Olga Orozco (born Olga Noemí Gugliotta, March 17, 1920 – August 15, 1999) was an Argentine poet.
WHILE HAPPINESS DIES
Olga Orozco
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.
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IT COMES IN EVERY STORM
Olga Orozco
And don’t you feel also, perhaps, a stormy sorrow on the skin of time,
like a scar that opens again
there where the sky was uprooted?
And don’t you feel sometimes how that night gathers its tatters into an ominous bird,
that there’s a beating of wings against the roof
like a clash among immense spring leaves struggling
or of hands clapping to summon you to death?
And don’t you feel afterwards someone exiled is crying,
that there’s an ember of a fallen angel on the threshold,
brought suddenly like a beggar by an alien gust of wind?
And don’t you feel, like me, that a house rolling toward the abyss
runs over you with a crash of crockery shattered by lightning,
with two empty shells embracing each other for an endless journey,
with a screech of axles suddenly fractured like love’s broken promises?
And don’t you feel then your bed sinking like the nave of a cathedral crushed by the fall of heaven,
and that a thick, heavy water runs over your face till the final judgment?
Again it’s the slime.
Again your heart thrown into the depth of the pool,
prisoner once more among the waves closing a dream.
Lie down as I do in this miserable eternity of one day.
It’s useless to howl.
From these waters the beasts of oblivion don’t drink.