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)