Journey To Valley Of The Moon In The Atacama Desert Poem by Alexandro Johns

From the oasis of San Pedro
I enter the Atacama Desert,
where millennia of silence
raise the transparency of the horizon:
I'm looking for a wasteland valley.

And as the Spanish
chronicler of conquest said:
guanacos and vicuñas in the distance,
"with sweet shapes and bridal eyes"
seem to hear my footsteps
on a ground where the souls become naked.

I walk on the voices of buried miners,
on top of adventurers' pains without homeland,
and over the forgotten preaching of gods.
Funerary masks of five thousand years
look at me from the sands beneath me.

The spectrum of sunset
is reflected in the calcined rocks,
when finally, in the middle
of the so-called Valley of the Moon,
I think I'm leaving the trace of my arid footprints
on the radiance that disturbs
the night of wolves
and blinds the poor Poets of Love.

Contrary to fame,
I feel that I'm dust in transit,
and like an astronaut I'm breathing eagerly
the intensity of the air,
but without the helmet and the hermetic suit
that I pretend to wear for survival in the city.

Perhaps in the geological fiction
of that moonlandscape
there was the answer of all trips
in my own gravity.