[Someone running with his head aflame …]

translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers
 

Someone running with his head aflame as the gods gust in his chest. The wind stirs him everywhere exhaustion’s gone. Others fall like trees. The men plead with the god of mice or the goddess of cow-eyes or the god who fills the sky with bolts. They wait for something to kindle them like embers. Now they burn their hands and their legs run almost by themselves. The heart brims with vitality. It’s the same wildness of the dogs, the heave of the river and sunlight; the donkey’s mettle, the tornado hoisting the waves into the clouds. Its name is ménos, force. The energy that ignites the limbs and heats the blood and propels life all around. An impulse is an extraordinary glimmer, sometimes a blind one. Force can be a vital explosion. It too ignores shatters whoever stands before it. The wind drives the legs uproots the leaves and howls in the water’s ears. The fire illuminates and razes the woods it’s in my thinking now.

 


 

[Alguien corriendo con la cabeza en llamas ...]

 

 

Alguien corriendo con la cabeza en llamas mientras los dioses soplan en su pecho. El viento lo aviva para todos lados el cansancio se va. Otros caen como árboles. Los hombres piden ayuda al dios de los ratones o la de ojos de vaca o al que llena el cielo de relámpagos. Esperan que algo los encienda como brasas. Ahora queman las manos y las piernas corren casi por su cuenta. El corazón desborda de vitalidad. Es la misma fiereza de los perros, el arrastre del río y el rayo del sol; el temple del burro, el tornado que levanta las olas por las nubes. Su nombre es ménos, fuerza. La energía que enciende los miembros y calienta la sangre y mueve la vida alrededor. El impulso es un brillo extraordinario, a veces ciego. La fuerza puede ser una explosión vital. También ignora hace pedazos al que tiene enfrente. El viento empuja las piernas y arranca las hojas y aúlla en los oídos del agua. El incendio ilumina y arrasa el bosque está en mi pensamiento ahora.

Credit

Copyright © 2026 by Daniel Lipara, translated by Robin Myers. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets. 

About this Poem

“This is a fragment from Like the Night Inside the Eyes, an autobiographical excavation of The Iliad. The book shifts between prose poems and Homeric similes. It began as an exercise in grief. At the center is loss and its gleam; the vital impulse that suddenly strikes. Like leaving home when I was a teenager or rooting myself to life after my parents’ death. In The Iliad, each life becomes more open and vulnerable to an energy that both drives and abandons it. It’s beautiful and frightening. You end up gazing in awe at what ravages you.”
—Daniel Lipara

“This poem is excerpted from Daniel’s second book, Like the Night Inside the Eyes, forthcoming in 2027 from Thirdhand Books in my translation. Both this specific poem and the whole book explore the need—beautiful, incontestable, terrifying—to change. Ever since I first read and then translated his debut, Another Life, I’ve loved how Daniel’s poems approach loss with a sense of wonder and curiosity; how they find the pulse of what wants to live, and does, astonishing itself. I wanted that pulse to sound in my translation, and I sought it in the nouns and verbs and punctuation I was translating with.”
—Robin Myers
 

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