Manuela Reads Melville His Cards

In Paita
with her old knowledge of men
she read the cards
for a young Englishman with blonde curls
She saw the ancient coded words and said them aloud:
May you be guided by the anger of the dispossessed.

To break with evil and pain
and to avoid their contagion
the only way for sensitive souls
is poverty and hardship.

Flee from the world and its laws
flee, even, from life itself.

Traslated from Spanish by Rowena Hill