Now,
poverty,
I follow you.
Just as you were implacable,
I am implacable.
Beside
every poor person
you will find me singing,
below every impossible
hospital sheet
you will find my song.
I follow you,
poverty,
I watch you,
I enclose you,
I isolate you,
I pull out your nails,
I break the teeth you have left.
I am everywhere:
in the ocean with the fishermen,
in the mine
with the men
as they wipe their brows,
as they dry the black sweat
they find my poems.
I go out every day
with the textile worker.
I have white hands
from giving out bread in the bakeries.
Wherever you go,
poverty,
my song
is singing,
my life is living,
my blood is fighting.
I will pull down
your pale banners,
wherever they are raised.
Other poets
once called you
holy,
they venerated your cape,
they fed off the smoke
and they disappeared.
I
challenge you,
with hard verses, I hit your face,
I board you and I banish you.
I, with others,
we are exiling you
from the earth to the moon
so you can stay there
cold and jailed
looking with one eye
at the bread and the fruit
which will cover the earth
of tomorrow.
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