To a Dead Rat Found in a Park by Mário Cesariny

To a Dead Rat Found in a Park

 

Here this creature ended its vast career

as a dark and living rat beneath the starry expanse 

its diminutive size only humiliates 

those who want everything to be enormous

and who can only think in human or arboreal terms

for surely this rat used as well as it knew how (or didn’t know)

the miracle of its tiny feet – so close to its snout! –

which were after all just right, serving perfectly

for clawing, scurrying, securing food or beating a retreat, when necessary

 

So is everything as it should be, O “God of small cemeteries”? 

But who knows who can know when a mistake has been made

in hell’s central offices? Who can be sure

that this creation so disdained by the world

but with a world inside it

wasn’t initially conceived to be a prince or judge of nations?

The worries it aroused in housewives and physicians!

Who are we to play at good and evil when they’re beyond us?

Some lad understood the uniqueness of its life

and ran over it with the wheel by which, eye to eye,

the vicitim and the executioner love each other

 

It had no friends? It deceived its parents?

 

It ran all about, a tiny body that had fun

and now just lies there, gooshy, smelly.

 

What sort of conclusion does this poem,

without exaggeration, merit?

Romantic? Classical? Regionalist?

 

What end belongs to a brave and humble body

killed at the height of its lyrical powers?

 

(Translated by Richard Zenith)