Communion (1918)
by César Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Wikisource

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1818179Communion1918César Vallejo

Regal Beauty! Your veins are fermentations
of my old nonexistence and of the black
champagne of my experience.

Your hair is the unknown root
of the tree of my vine.
Your hair is the is the thread of a miter
of the daydream I lost!

Your body is the foaming scrap
of a rosy Jordan;
and it waves like a beatific lake
that would put to shame the evil viper!

Your arms make one thirst for the infinite,
with their chaste Hesperides of light,
as two white redemptive paths,
two dying cries from one cross.
And they’re manifested in the unvanquished blood
of my blue impossibility!

Your feet are two heraldic larks
eternally arriving from my yesterday!
Regal Beauty! Your feet are the two tears
that I choked back when falling from the Spirit,
on a Palm Sunday when I entered the world,
already forever far from Bethlehem.


 This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.

Original:

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.


The longest-living author of this work died in 1938, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 85 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.

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Translation:

This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed.

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