Like a churchyard left to rot, or one where the poor are buried
in the highest places, like loving a woman you cannot touch
because she is already dead or in the arms of another
is the soldier who spills no innocent blood.
Some are very coarse like my hands when I touch a woman or speak to one.
Some are the kisses that a mourner gives to death,
that a child gives to the fire that dedicates their homes to the deep night.
Some I have never seen but I have heard the witnesses.
Terrible and swift as a whip or the break of day, fearsome
as the crows lunging at the eyes of the fallen, rage like the fangs of the sun!
We have flayed men and woven their skins for your bedsheets, Red One,
lover of the goddess of love, shamed by the Crippled, defeated by the Greeks-
but are you not yet satisfied with our savagery? Was it not enough to kill
their women and children with darts that pierce as a ray of light pierces
a mountain from impossibly far away, was it necessary to corrupt our champion?
He seems so hungry for the wine in veins, even if he does not drink his fill.
He does not know how to make a sacrifice to you, except with the blood and flesh
of these our human kin: he sets them aflame. He prays wordlessly, he avenges.
Bless him, my God, for soon he is to be judged.
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