Another poem by Peruvian Blanca Varela. The original is on my other webblog, poesía en español. This is a version done in about 10 minutes. There are a few lines that need more work. I could work on them for weeks, yet the translation would improve only marginally: "our tongues are hard we the devourers of god" is really "tenemos la lengua dura los devoradores de dios." The line has to end with the word god so that the next lines will flow out of th first line of the stanza. So, it cannot be "we, the devourers of god, have hard tongues." I won't allow myself to introduce punctuation into a poem that refuses it.

ELEVATED IDEAS

Atop a ladder
I had god under the hammer

a divine combination
white black and the red of the redemptive blood
freshly shed

the atrocity saves us in these crises
that force us to climb up to the last rung

vertigo draws near us
darkness protects us
we are closer and closer

our tongues are hard we the devourers of god
of that god that grows each night
with our hair and nails
of that god who is crushable
perishable
digestible

illumination or blindness

to nail a fly
with a single blow of iron
into the whitest wall