We are the ones who pray before the inanimate
Asking for forgiveness for waking him up.
Luis Benítez
Luis Benítez was born in Buenos Aires on November 10, 1956. His 50 books of poetry, essays, and fiction have been published in Argentina, Chile, France, Italy, Mexico, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, UK, USA and Uruguay. He is considered one of the most prominent voices in contemporary Argentine poetry and a leading figure in the genre throughout Latin America. He has received the title of Compagnon de la Poèsie from the Association La Porte des Poètes, based at the Université de La Sorbonne in Paris, France. He is a member of the Argentine PEN Center, the Association of Argentine Poets, and the Society of Writers of the Argentine Republic. His literary work has received several international awards including the International Best Poets & Translators Prize, awarded by The International Poetry Translation and Research Centre, The Journal of Rendition of International Poetry [Multilingual], and The Board of Directors of World Union of Poetry Magazines, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China, 2024, and American Poet of the Year Award, awarded by the United Nations World Silk Road Forum and the Silk Road International Federation, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2025.
(English versions by Araceli Lacore)
The evilness of the inanimate
A god hidden in the object does not answer
Anymore. The screen does not light up
The lights of the house do not turn on.
Everything takes us back to the cave
The misery of mood at sunset.
It is the bleakness of the world
And the terror of the unknown
That one, the wisest, the most feared of all
Of those who return smiling. They’ve never gone:
They were waiting for a flaw inexperience,
And no engineer (the shaman of things)
By our side: the telephone does not work.
We try again and again
Although we know it is a useless and lonely ritual.
We are the ones who pray before the inanimate
Asking for forgiveness for waking him up.
____
Wild boar salami
From the deli
To this board where for the second time
A knife transforms it
Nothing it has lost, only the shape
Its black flesh, its potent taste and smell
Takes you with the first bite
To midnight in the cornfields
Where the shot found it
The second slice allows you
To see the sleepless farmer and his dogs
Later the flight destroying everything
The 30 cm tusks searching
Searching for the other flesh
The one that has hurt it
Accidentally I cut myself cutting another slice
The dead animal in my hands drank my blood,
Found comfort before closing its small evil eyes
Evil forever.
____
Barely an ant on this table
I am going to write a poem
About an ant that will climb to this table.
Barely half a centimeter of life
Walking across this magnitude of shiny Formica
A plateau for her tiny everyday distances
And what to say of the whole room and the house
The immense country where she was born
She will barely know in her entire life,
(Seventy years condensed into three)
Partially, the valley leading to the kitchen and the plateau
And beyond without her, the streets
And then the fields, there where all direction is extinguished
And then the seas to the other coasts
And even beyond outside the great blue ball
The enormous void where spheres, suns, galaxies roll
And who knows what else
Which, like the ant I write about,
Convinced that no one knows
That the table she walks on is a whole plateau
And that the world is reduced to the hallway leading to the kitchen
____
Mycenae
These black rotten stones
Gathered a hundred cities
To raze a single one
Therefore the splendid ilion was no more
So Rome could rise centuries later
As death breeds
Mycenae was its cradle:
The prefect sent by Caesar to govern Achaea
Which once was Greece
Never knew it,
Nor did alexander care,
Who left it behind for Asia
This collapse of glories
Broken and forgotten,
Metaphor and future even in its nothingness,
Knows itself to be mere waiting
For that common destiny
The one that begins at its gates
And the one that ends at its gates.
____
Do not ask anything of poetry
Do not ask anything of poetry
To save you to lull you or to hide you
Do not ask it to manufacture a world for you
Or simply to manufacture you
Do not ask it for friends or for lovers.
Do not ask it for fame not even for a name
Do not ask it as you would a plaster god
Or a lending bank,
As you would someone who knows what time it is,
Someone who knows where that avenue is
Do not ask it for money as you would ask a millionaire,
Nor for protection as you would a policeman.
Above all: do not ask it for quarter.
____
On the foolishness of fairy tales
The good ones almost never win.
Love is weak
Usually, neither late nor early,
Justice is done
And time
Cannot heal
Even the smallest wound
But what would become of us
(Understand value and cherish)
Without fairy tales?
_____
A terrible shadow in every age
Achilles must always die
To be Achilles and not the other one
Who suspended at his heels lingered.
The Greeks must always triumph at salamis
The Persians yield glory
To the brave men of Leonidas at Thermopylae.
No age thinks what it says
Nor says what it thinks
In the end
The century proves it
Civilization and barbarism
Are the same.
___________
