Friday, August 26, 2011

Can You? by Nicholas Guillen

Can you sell me the air as it slips through your fingers
As it slaps at your face and untidies your hair?
Perhaps you could sell me fivepennyworth of wind
or more, perhaps sell me a storm?
Perhaps the elegant air
you would sell me, that air
(not all of it) which trips around
your garden, from corolla to corolla
in your garden for the birds
tenpenceworth of elegant air.


The air spins and goes by
in a butterfly
Belongs to no-one, no-one.
Can you sell me the sky
the sky sometimes blue
or grey sometimes
a strip of your sky
the bit you think you bought with the trees
of your garden, as one buys the roof with the house?
Can you sell me a dollar
of sky, two miles
of sky, a slice, whatever you can
of your sky?


The sky is in the clouds
The clouds go by
Belong to no-one, no-one.
Can you sell me rain, the water
given to you by your tears, and moistening your tongue?
Can you sell me a dollar of water
from a spring, a gravid cloud
crinkly and soft as sheep
or perhaps rainwater up in the mountains
or the water from puddles
left for the dogs
or a stretch of sea, maybe a lake,
a hundred dollars of lake


Water falls, rolls on.
Water rolls on, goes by.
Belongs to no-one, no-one.
Can you sell me the earth, the deep
night of the roots, teeth
of dinosaurs and the lime
dispersed from distant skeletons?
Can you sell me forests lying buried, birds that are dead
fishes of stone, the sulphur
of volcanoes, a thousand million years
twisting their way up? Can you
sell me the earth, can you
sell me the earth, can you?


Your earth is mine
Trodden by everyone's feet
Belongs to no-one, no-one.

Nicolas Guillen (Cuba)

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