Vain Warnings Poem by Silvina Ocampo

Be careful with your imagination.
Someplace on earth it remains, all the time it follows us
little by little turning into crude or delicate reality
what man or beast, plants or stones imagined.
The sick with fever, those who shake, those who want to and cannot speak,
in waiting rooms, amid pages of newspapers, oranges,
those who gaze at the ceiling or else the sun, injured,
those who embrace unlawfully, not knowing why
or in the blue precinct of marriage, those disfigured by hearty laughter,
the children, the slaves, the unjust, those who go shopping, handle meat,
the prisoners, soldiers, tyrants, with faces of singers,
the swimmers, the eager executioners, those who blaspheme,
those who beg or give, the missionaries, the anarchists,
the submissive, the proud, the solitary, those who don't understand,
those who work constantly,
those who get tired after never doing anything
again don't do anything without a break, irreducibly, the unborn,
those who carry signs in their fur, letters, drawings,
mysteries that no one has deciphered,
those who wash everything all day long like the raccoon,

the foul-smelling that scavenge for bones or excrement,
wallowing about to stink even more,
those who simply appear spiritual, or musical, or poetic,
those who devour others like them
or themselves because driven mad,
those that are streaked, with spots, with silver scales and tails,
the ferocious and the domesticated, those who love,
those who eat each other in order to fecundate,
those who live only on grass or precious milk
or those who need to eat rotten meat
those who crawl or the most beautiful, with princely feathers
those whom the water gathers among its glass, clear green or black
in the dark molds of the earth, buried,

those who take so long in dying that they do not die
and seem like plants or else stones, with the additions of time
those who barely live by a miracle, by suicide, on nothing
everything that they have imagined
and that we mortals imagine
forms the reality of the world.