1022. Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

Harvey Ellis - Harvey Ellis

my ancestors surround me

like walls of a canyon

quiet

stone hard

their ideas drift over me

like breezes at sunset

we gather sticks

and make settlements

what we do is only partly

our own

and partly continuation

down through the chromosomes

my son

my baby sleeps behind me

stirring in the night

for the touch

that lets him continue

he is arranging 

in his small form the furniture

and windows of his home

it will be a lot like mine

it will be a lot like theirs

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