PRAYER OF THE VANQUISHED Poem by Federico Díaz-Granados

Lord of the vanquished
I pray to you for myself, courier of the birds.
I never knew the magic and the miracle
before passing through the bonfire of resurrection.
I who never rose up early
nor was granted any sunset,
you banished my tears from your canvas, the dawn of my eyes.

Lord of the mistaken ones
why did you give her my summers
and me her tempests,
why out of the three mysteries
did you reveal to me first the painful ones?

Lord of solitude, patron of the weak
for each return there is an inventory of absences;
let my nights be inhabited by a few splendours
even though they are the last dawns to visit my flesh.
If we men are made in your own image
you must be a tired creature, a faded being
smelling of rancid bodies inside your skin,
ambassador of hunger
weighing its sadness to understand
why you gave us these souls with expiry dates.

Lord of the clumsy
you who know nothing of time,
who have in your kingdom Van Gogh, patron of light,
why did you send bitterness to this side of the wind,
to this valley of strayed ones, of orphans
where my angels get drunk
with the fermented oil of my solitude?

Lord of my failures and agonies,
I pray to you for my words, only seed of the first Paradise,
for my dreams that at dawn are ash on my pillow,
for my urgencies and failures, the jetsam of days,
and give me now, on this shore,
the wonder and the colour of the first awakening in death.