Hidden repentant

Hidden repentant

By Irene Tauch

Taken from

https://radiocristiandad.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/poesias-desde-la-inhospita-trinchera-oculto-arrepentido/

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

Rough as a gray slab in the graveyard,
Withered like the grass in the cold winter,
Like an old, slumbrous derelict, a vagabond,
I see myself one day on this bed lying.

You can hear my breast's piteous creaking 
And of my lips, the silent galloping,
I want to hear at least one single praise,
So I can think I am and am alive.

I want a bit of tenderness and bosom.
Today, I think and feel just like a toddler
And though they tell me I am the experience,
To me no longer cares anyone to listen.

It's that, at times, my conscience feels remorse
For everything that in this life I have lived.
Recollections bring me back my prudence
And the truth that enlightens me is forgetting.

I no longer know if there is no infinite,
Although I have sustained this at each step, 
And I know I am now close to the scaffold,
And it´s hard to imagine I am finite.

And it´s now in the hour of my death,
That I cannot say that I am with You
Is the greatest of sorrows ever suffered,
And the pain that I suffer at every instant. 

My pride bars me from confessing You
And to tell the world that I adore You.
This is why I have deserved
Not to be up to contemplate You someday. 

Your Passion, through which You redeemed us
I failed to accept. Oh God, what nonsense!
How do I wish that I could be serene,
To form part of Your army of saintly souls,
To worship You eternally, but in the meantime

To be a simple and repentant mortal.