Why were we so full of hope in those days? Looking back, I see so clearly that violence was worsening. Living through that time, we didn’t see that. We believed in our capacity to grow a great country. A just society.

La ciudad se estremece
con sus ruidos terribles,
convulsiones
de risa,
estertores de miedo.
Y la ciudad tiembla
y conjetura
con sus muecas
descoloridas
y sus danzas
informes.

It was not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

A war between Europeans is a civil war.

The destiny of the land, the nation, the South, the State, the County, was already whirling into the plunge of its precipice, not that the State and the South knew it, because the first seconds of fall always seem like soar.