Topic: From within the Heavens

[Nichi]

From within the Heavens

From within the heavens they come,
the beautiful flowers, the beautiful songs,
but our yearning spoils them,
our inventiveness makes them lose their fragrance,
although not those of the Chichimec prince Tecayehuatzin.
With his, rejoice!

Friendship is a shower of precious flowers
White tufts of heron feathers
are woven with precious red flowers,
among the branches of the trees
under which stroll and sip
the lords and nobles

Your beautiful song
is a golden wood thrush
most beautiful, you raise it up.
You are in a field of flowers.
Among the flowery bushes you sing.
Are you perchance a precious bird of the Giver of Life?
Perchance you have spoken with God?
As soon as you saw the dawn,
you began to sing.
Would that I exert myself, that my heart desire,
the flowers of the shield,
the flowers of the Giver of Life.

What can my heart do?
In vain we have come,
we have blossomed forth on earth.
Will I have to go alone
like the flowers that perish?
Will nothing remain of my name?
Nothing of my fame here on earth?
At least my flowers, at least my songs!
What can my heart do?
In vain we have come,
we have blossomed forth on earth.

Let us enjoy, O friends,
here we can embrace.
We stroll over the flowery earth.
No one here can do away
with the flowers and the songs,
they will endure in the house of the Giver of Life

Earth is the region of the fleeting moment.
Is it also thus in the Place
Where in Some Way One Lives?

Is one happy there?
Is there friendship?
Or is it only here on earth
we come to know our faces?


Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin
(translated by Miguel León-Portilla)
16th Century NAHUATL Poem

[Nichi]

Lonely as a cloud

What shall we sing, my friends?
In what shall we rejoice?
There alone our song lives,
Where our ancestors were born.
On Earth, where they lived...
I suffer here on Earth...
He who gives life conceals

Men in a casket and in an ark....
But shall I see them? Shall my eyes see
The faces of my father and my mother?
Can they offer me their song,
Their words, which I search for?
Here is no one,
They have left us as orphans, here on Earth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Song of Friendship

I look with hatred on death and I suffer...
It matters not what precious stones
The same thread unites,
It does not matter that we are united
Like gems on the same necklace...
My friend, my true friend,
Let us love one another, for the love of god.
As you know, so too do I know; we live only once.
One day we shall go hence.
We are come here only to know one another,
Only on loan have we come to Earth...
Yet we live here with dejection,
Here, where we are watched and spied upon...


Both by Unnamed
Tlamatinime (The Men with Words)
http://www.carnaval.com/dead/aztec_poetry.htm

[Nichi]

I scatter flowers of war, I of the smiling face
with which I greet the war.
I am a quetzal bird and I arrive flying,
among the difficult steps which come with the war.

I am a precious dappled horse of red collar,
I arrive flying: I come to be converted into a flower,
I in the bloody Rabbit.



NAHUATL POEM
Unknown



Quetzal Bird