Sad Men Have No Dancing Partners Poem by Piedad Bonnett

Sad men frighten birds away.
Down to their pensive foreheads descend
the clouds
and dissolve into an opaque drizzle.
Flowers languish
in the gardens of the sad men.
Their precipices tempt death.
Whereas
the women that are within a woman
are all born at the same time
in front of the sad eyes of the sad men.
The woman vessel again opens her belly
and offers the sad man her redeeming milk.
The woman child kisses with fervor
his paternal, desolate widower's hands.
And she who walks silently in the house
shines his black hours and patches up
all the holes in his breast.
There is another that lends to the sad man
her two hands as if they were wings.
But sad men are deaf to their music.
There is no lonelier woman then,
more sadly lonely,
than she who wants to love a sad man.

Translation: 2005, Nicolás Suescún