Carlos Arredondo,
Edinburgh, May 2004

Translation by John Manson

Existence is everyone's question,
The weak and the powerful.
It cost me nothing to know
from its abundant appearances
that everything was possible:
to observe the earth,
to criticize life,
to give a stick to the stubborn,
to take five hundred and eighty-three lives without going to jail,
to sell the moon to the unwary even though I might have said,
Hell, hell, I demand an explanation!!!
I asked myself if indeed
The universe is a magnet for scientists
Or matter for the religious.

Disjointed discussions, trivial and profound,
end up discovering
I and you,
the problem of living in order to die
in hell
or in paradise
Good!
Clear! or something similar.
There are the two 'I's' and the neighbour opposite,
the insecure.
The question unwind underground
With sublety,
In the transparent fringes of the mildness of the Most High amen,
And the pedantry of the inflexible professor;
Conversing in a disciplined way
Of the credible,
The possible,
The invisiblew,
Looking inwards,
Looking outwards,
All
With a foot in the cosmos
And the other in science,
And I, private,
Smiling
With thoughts well-established
On the earth.

:Comment: Surely existence isn't a childish matter or some crazy idea that tingles our ears?