The Butchersâ Reincarnation: Visions of the Nuclear Age
ReencarnaciĂłn de los carniceros: Visiones de la Era Nuclear
Ăscar Hahn
Translated by Trans. G. J. Racz
The Horsemen of the Apocalypse
At twelve theyâll come by frothing at the mouth
and leave their tufts of smoke before you there
these horses skin and bones beneath the sun
with riders dressed as skeletons set to hurl
their fierce invective at you seven deep
and seven long in war formation out
from Moscow Syria Berlin Washington
in hearses marked with swastikas and stars
amid more creatures still with heads of men
en route to those same limits of the world
in flames the very catacombs of hell
their lesson for unseeing eyes along
a river formed of radioactive blood
as corporations dictate and advance
without the least compassion pitiless
at risk of emptying the firmament
upon the innocent now hiding here
behind frail walls of cardboard and of straw
The Fifth Element
A person can lose his way in life
turn off the path and take the wrong road
Entering through a door that wasnât in his plans
and never getting out
Inside heâll be surrounded by wires
walls and moats
Thatâs when life starts setting the pace
and he parades around in circles
like the inmates in a prison yard
or goes on living blindly
like a man condemned to death
who knows his sentence
but not the day his execution will be carried out
Lives outside his own
other peopleâs lives donât matter to the dead man
The only thing that does
is the life inside us all
and if that life goes away
a person goes with it taken by the hand
for he no longer exists
Gone finished vanished
For all the living remember us
or however often they place flowers on our graves
nothing changes
because no one is made
of the substance of memory
Those famous heroes
whose statues fill the city
are no less dead
than the bones that lie
in the tomb of the unknown soldier
Thatâs what we are:Â unknown soldiers
or known ones (itâs all the same)
who day by day not only lose the battle
but the war
Memory is a faculty of the living
The dead donât remember a thing
To be dead means having no past
present or future
Everything we say about the deceased
we claim as experts
in existences weâve never had
Does anyone really know what the water
earth air or fire thinks?
Death is the fifth element
Iâm Just Saying
What if God wasnât as great as they say
but just the size of a pinhead?
Or smaller still:Â maybe like an atom
or subatomic particle?
Or tinier yet:Â perhaps like a quantum
of some unmeasurably minute substance?
And what if He wasnât the Supreme Being
but the supremely negligible one?
Then what if He had created man
in His own image and likeness?
Iâm just saying
These poems are part of the title, The Butchersâ Reincarnation: Visions of the Nuclear by Ăscar Hahn and translated by Trans. G. J. Racz. Used with the permission of Dos Madres Press.
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