Tithe of the Assassins
We don’t know what they did with the newborns
or with their mothers (but we can imagine).
Those able to escape had to ignore the desperate cries of the dying.
Now great shopping centers are sprouting up like mushrooms in
damp darkness, where light is a boiling TV screen.
Many survivors of the carnage are writing their memoirs (a malady of
old age).
Others prefer to converse silently with the rocks and trees.
Only the dead still dream, as they did when they were children, that
someday they’ll be sailors amid islands of tamarind trees.
Translated from the Spanish by
Cynthia Steele
