#39 Sat (7/30/22) - A poem inspired by Jorge Luis Borges' poems The plot, To a son and To a certain ghost, 1940

To make his horror perfect, Caesar, hemmed about at the foot of a statue
by his friends' impatient knives, discovers among the faces and the blades
the face of Marcus Junius Brutus, his ward, perhaps his very son—and so
Caesar stops defending himself, and cries out:

It was not I who begot you. It was the dead --

my father, and his father, and their forebears,

all those who through a labyrinth of loves

in a dawn so ancient it has become mythology by now,

May you be saved, by your sons 

and glorious ghosts.

I summon them and they respond,

thronging out of the numberless past,

I feel their multitudes. They are who we are,

and you among us, 

you and the sons to come

that you will beget.

In the black night, a time auspicious

for the arts of rhetoric and magic, they loom over me,

and I seek out the frailest, the most tenuous,

and say to him: O friend, again

Fate is partial to repetitions, variations, symmetries.

Let those who hate you wander without end

inside your labyrinths of time.

Let their night be measured by centuries, by eras,

          by pyramids...

He dies, but he does not know that he has died.

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Para que su horror sea perfecto, César, acosado al pie de una estatua por los impacientes puñales de sus amigos, descubre entre las caras y los aceros la de Marco Junio Bruto, su protegido, acaso su hijo, y ya no se defiende y exclama:

No soy yo quien te engendra. Son los muertos.
Son mi padre, su padre y sus mayores;
son los que un largo dédalo de amores, en una aurora
tan antigua que ya es mitología,

que tus hijos te salven y también tus sombras gloriosas.
las invoco y acuden desde el innumerable pasado,

Siento su multitud. Somos nosotros
y, entre nosotros, tú y los venideros
hijos que has de engendrar.

Se ciernen sobre mí en la alta noche
propicia a la retórica y a la magia
y busco la más tenue, la deleznable,
y le advierto: oh, amigo,

Al destino le agradan las repeticiones, las variantes, las simetrías;
Que por sus laberintos de tiempo
erren sin fin los que odian.
Que su noche se mida por centurias, por eras, por pirámides,

Lo matan y no sabe que muere. 

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Arranged from the translations by Reid, di Giovanni and Andrew Hurley.