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