In the air thick with dust
Fades the distance, the promise of another world.
Fissures, marshes, ancient pathways,
Massacres, heat and carcasses,
The funereal grip of ivory and blood.
The guardians of the savage world
Also possess the cloudy image
Of threatened species, of protected species,
And suffer the hidden face
Of man, that arranger of skin
Who, from natural park to zoo,
And from museum of disappeared species,
Strips, tans, falsifies
And peoples his galleries of evolution.
The great taxidermist of creation,
Fanatic of concentration camps,
Prisoner of his fantasies of purification
Thus projects the illusion
That barbed wire and stuffed bodies
Can strangely perpetuate
The instant of emotion.