Thank you for your comments and emails regarding Seamus. She was my little Vomitron, the licker of water glasses, butter thief, a good cross-country traveler and house guest in many homes from North Carolina to Michigan, and enemy of many cats. She jumped off my head to impress people. She warned me of palmetto bugs in my bed in Florida. She did not warn me away from strange men as I thought she might. Instead, she loved them all. We buried her in our back yard at the top of a hill. Beyond that hill, we see a bit of Washington and, every evening, the setting sun.

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I like this game of posting what we thought about a year ago. Here’s a post from March of last year.

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Last year, I asked people to put the name of their favorite poem in the comments section. I collected them all together and this was one of them.

Una poema para ustedes…

LOS HERALDOS NEGROS

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes…Yo no sé!
Golpes como del odio de Dios; como si ante ellos,
la resaca de todo lo sufrido
se empozara en el alma…Yo no sé!

Son pocos; pero son… Abren zanjas oscuras
en el rostro más fiero y en el lomo más fuerte.
Serán talvez los potros de bárbaros atilas;
o los heraldos negros que nos manda la Muerte.

Son las caídas hondas de los Cristos del alma,
de alguna fe adorable que el Destino blasfema.
Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones
de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema

Y el hombre… Pobre… pobre! Vuelve los ojos, como
cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada;
vuelve los ojos locos, y todo lo vivido
se empoza, como charco de culpa, en la mirada.

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes…Yo no sé!

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Y en ingles…

Black Messengers.

There are in life such hard blows . . . I don’t know!
Blows seemingly from God’s wrath; as if before them
the undertow of all our sufferings
is embedded in our souls . . . I don’t know!

There are few; but are . . . opening dark furrows
in the fiercest of faces and the strongest of loins,
They are perhaps the colts of barbaric Attilas
or the dark heralds Death sends us.

They are the deep falls of the Christ of the soul,
of some adorable one that Destiny Blasphemes.
Those bloody blows are the crepitation
of some bread getting burned on us by the oven’s door

And the man . . . poor . . . poor!
He turns his eyes around, like
when patting calls us upon our shoulder;
he turns his crazed maddened eyes,
and all of life’s experiences become stagnant, like a puddle of guilt, in a daze.

There are such hard blows in life. I don’t know

Cesar Vallejo