My earliest memory of Veracruz
is that heavy groundswell:
black birds that seemed to carry night on their wings
“They’re called pichos,” someone told me
They must have been starlings or grackles, or of that feather
The name, though, doesn’t matter: what I remember
is the dark garrulousness, the fear,
the mysterious randomness of the way in which the birds,
like giant worms or locusts, obscured the trees.
They fell like meteorites from cornices and power lines
an unarmed throng attempting vainly to stem the tide of
catastrophe
The twilight, suffocated, faded and died
ashes of a lifeless fire
high in the branches
The sky itself was a dark bird
as unexpectedly silence settled in the air
We checked into
the hotel after the long journey
My grandfather
bought the Mexico City newspaper
He read me the news of that bomb
of that place with the strange, faraway name
of that death that descended like the night and the birds,
of those living bodies snuffed out in the flames
Pacheco, José Emilio. "The Birds." An Ark for the Next Millennium: Poems. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. p. 39.