This page will be no less a riddle
than those of my holy books
or those others repeated
by ignorant mouths
believing them the handiwork of a man,
not the Spirit’s dark mirrors.
I who am the Was, the Is, and the Is to Come
again condescend to the written word
which is time in succession and no more than an emblem.
Who plays with a child plays with something
near and mysterious;
wanting once to play with My children,
I stood among them with awe and tenderness.
I was born of a womb by an act of magic.
I lived under a spell, imprisoned in a body,
in the humbleness of a soul.
I knew memory,
that coin that’s never twice the same.
I knew hope and fear,
those twin faces of the uncertain future.
I knew wakefulness, sleep, and dreams,
ignorance, the flesh,
reason’s roundabout labyrinths,
the friendship of men,
the blind devotion of dogs.
I was loved, understood, praised, and hung from a cross.
I drank my cup to the dregs.
My eyes saw what they had never seen –
night and its many stars.
I knew things smooth and gritty, uneven and rough,
the taste of honey and apple,
water in the throat of thirst,
the weight of metal in the hand,
the human voice, the sound of footsteps on the grass,
the smell of rain in Galilee,
the cry of birds on high.
I knew bitterness as well.
I have entrusted the writing of these words to a common man;
they will never be what I want to say
but only their shadow.
These signs are dropped from My eternity.
Let someone else write the poem, not he who is now its scribe.
Tomorrow I shall be a great tree in Asia,
or a tiger among tigers
preaching my law to the tigers’ woods.
Sometimes homesick, I think back
on the smell of that carpenter’s shop.
Jorge Luis Borges.
Merry christmas to all except one!