Friday, March 16, 2018

1021. To The Son - Jorge Luis Borges

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid

It was not I who begot you. It was the dead—
my father, and his father, and their forebears,
all those who through a labyrinth of loves
descend from Adam and the desert wastes
of Cain and Abel, in a dawn so ancient
it has become mythology by now,
to arrive, blood and marrow, at this day
in the future, in which I now beget you.
I feed their multitudes. They are who we are,
and you among us, you and the the sons to come
that you will beget. The latest in the line
and in red Adam’s line. I too am those others.
Eternity is present in the things
of time and its impatient happenings

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