Navidad en el Hudson

That gray sponge!
That sailor whose throat was just cut.
That great river.
Those dark boundaries of the breeze.
That keen blade, my love, that keen blade.
The four sailors wrestled with the world.
With that sharp-edged world that all eyes see.
With the world no one can know without horses.
One, a hundred, a thousand sailors
wrestling with the world of keen-edged velocities,
unaware that the world
was alone in the sky.

The world alone in the lonely sky.
Hills of hammers and the thick grass’s triumph.
Teeming anthills and coins in the mire.
The world alone in the lonely sky,
and the air where all the villages end.

The earthworm sand its terror of the wheel,
and the sailor whose throat was slashed
sang to the water-bear that held him close;
and they were all singing alleluia,
alleluia. Deserted sky.
It’s all the same — the same! — alleluia.

I stood all night on the scaffolding in the boroughs,
leaving my blood on the stucco projects,
helping the sailors lower their ripped sails,
and I stand with empty ands in the murmur of the river’s mouth.
It doesn’t matter if every minute
a newborn child waves the little branches of its veins,
of if a newborn viper, set free beneath the branches,
calms the blood lust of those who looks at the nude.
What matter is this: emptied space. Lonely world. River’s mouth.
Not dawn. Idle fable.
This alone: river’s mouth.
Oh, my gray sponge!
Oh, my throat just cut open!
Oh, my great river!
Oh, my breeze’s boundaries that are not mine!
Oh, the keep blade of my love, oh, the cutting blade!

Federico Garcia Lorca
Poet In New York
New York, December 27, 1929