WHILE HAPPINESS DIES

I have seen happiness lose its way
crying out through a shadowy and lonely woods
where its last day was passed, silent,
forgetting mankind like the spent leaves
that a slow season clings to.

Never again, disdainful between afternoons,
its golden mask,
luminous hands conducting dreams
to a thirsty life,
the fugitive cloak,
its deceiving reflection in the ivy that
memories guard like a lost king.

Oh, the sorrowful repose of earth!
Someone is still waiting with the indecisive river
that blood holds:
he who in his obscurity strikes vainly at walls
pursuing a shadow taller than its nights,
and the terse ash barely looks at dawn and some
flower withers on his chest;
and over there the others
those who search for that corner of air prepared to form
like the anterior body that it inhabited
in remote ages.

They want to seize a path in the dust,
to detain in light their poor paradises made of slow,
laborious talents,
but that puff suffices,
it barely shudders the oscillating branches,
to barter peace for death,
for a sluggish habit of desires.

Because man lives undefended in his happiness
and only then, while his vain melody dies
in the distance
do our faces recover our invincible aura.