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

From the collection The Black Heralds (Los heraldos negros)

1828323Ostrich1918César Vallejo

Melancholy, remove your sweet beak already;
don’t gorge your hunger in my wheat fields of light.
Melancholy, it’s enough! As your daggers drink
the blood my blue leech would drain!

Don’t finish all the fallen woman’s manna;
I wish that tomorrow some cross may arise from it,
on that tomorrow on which I may not have someone to turn my eyes towards,
when the coffin opens its great mocking O.

My heart is a flowerpot watered by grief;
there are other old birds that graze within it...
Melancholy, stop withering my life,
and reveal your woman’s lip...!


 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.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse

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.

Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse