To a coin

Cold and storming the night I weighed anchor from Montevideo.

Rounding the Cerro,

I threw from the highest deck

a coin that shone and drowned in the muddy water,

a thing of light snatched by time and darkness.

I had the feeling of having committed an irrevocable act,

of aggregating to the history of the planet

two incessant, parallel, perhaps infinite series:

my destiny, made of worry, love and vain vicissitudes

and that of the metal disk

which the waters gave to the bland abyss

or to remote seas that still eat away

remains of Saxon and Viking.

To each instant of my sleep or waking

corresponds another of the blind coin’s.

Sometimes I have felt remorse

and sometimes envy,

of you who are, like us, in time and its labyrinth

and do not know it.

Jorge Luis Borges