Other gods

The white gods are sleeping

in the books:

the starch of them is broken, the cold

devoured their eyes,

they subsist without the clarity of once

and keep hardly a memory

of love between their thighs.

The statue all broken up

kept not in its waist

the lightning.

The whiteness has gone out.

Nonetheless, know, tired heroes,

with knees of marble,

that the intransigent god

of the ocean isles

or the hirsute, feathered,

bloody

divinity of Africa,

frowning in its wrap

or naked in the feast of the species,

tribal beast or heart totemic,

drum, shield, lance that throve in thickness

or beside black rivers that wept,

go on burning, alive,

actual, ancestral,

full of blood and dreams and sounds:

still not seated on the throne

like specters of marble

born of the scud,

but continue in darkness

their dark battle.

Pablo Neruda