Cesar Vallejo

 Our Daily Bread 

(for Alejandro Gamboa)

Breakfast is drunk... Moist earth
Of the cemetery smells of the beloved blood.
Winter city... The biting crossing
Of a cart that appears to drag down
An emotion of fasting in chains!

I want to knock on all doors.
And ask for I don’t know whom; and then
To see the poor, and, weeping silences,
To give fragments of fresh bread to everyone.
To sack the vineyards of the rich
With two sacred hands
That a blaze of light
Set flying loose from the nails of the Cross!

Morning eyelids, don’t open! 
Give us our daily bread, 
Lord...!

All my bones are strangers;
Perhaps 1 stole them!

I come to give myself what was perhaps
Assigned to someone else;
And I think that, if I had not been born,
Some other poor fellow would be drinking this coffee!
I am an evil thief... Where shall I go?

In this cold time in which the earth 
Transcends human dust and is so sad, 
I want to knock on every door. 
And beg pardon of I don’t know whom. 
And make them slices of fresh bread 
Here, in the oven of my heart...!

                                    From The Black Messengers (1918)

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