The World's Most Beautiful Poem

Adapted from "La Canción Más Hermosa del Mundo," by Joaquín Sabina

I had a buttonhole and no button, a budding caterpillar,

Half a pair of clown shoes, and a soul sold for the highest bidder,

A Remington and Sons with the sniffles, a train that came late,

A passport pending, and the shape of a mug’s ass on my face.

I had unpaid loans, and the lone needle of a compass,

A croaking throat, or Adam’s apple to note, minus a wise rib;

A diabetic bike, and a spike in the stem of your arm,

Nimrod’s Hubris, Herod’s Census,

Noah missing the dove in his ark.

My Annie Hall, my Giaconda, my Wendy (first come the ladies),

My Chaplin, my Satchmo, my Gershwin, My Dinner with André,

My Tintin, my yo-yo, my ET, My Seven of Sparrows,

The hallway where I undressed you without shedding your clothes.

My hideaway, my clef, the broken wristwatch in my pocket,

The genie hiding in the lamp waiting inside my rain jacket,

I found out too late that spring lasted only a second,

I wanted to write the world's most beautiful poem.

I wanted to write those verses.

Let me introduce you to my bastard father, to my single wife,

to my twin brother, who got lost in a concert of furious fistfights,

to the man who baptized me in a lake that glowed black like the sun,

to Simbad who swung with his sword and was met with a gun,

To the woman in whose pupils I first saw my eyes’ own reflection,

To the breastplate that shields me from the gray spears of depression,

Butterflies that schoolboys with acne hunt down in their dreams

When they dream of embracing Venus de Milo without her limbs.

I was freed from the stupid percent, from the curse of white-bred,

making a living teaching theory in the Music School for Sirens,

and one day with Magdalene I went on a tour of Mount Calvary.

She said,

"What would you do if he made you choose between love and history?"

At the end of the path of despair I planted my flag,

I inherited a bottle of rum from a vagrant’s dead hands,

Lost my nose seeking an aroma in Rapunzel’s tresses,

And in my coma I learned lessons only to when waking forget them.

I never knocked out the verses.

For the poem of the ocean slobbering and lightning flashing in veins,

Of the tears that come flooding when they’re worth all of the pain,

Of the page pregnant in the womb of a wanderer's tablet,

Of the hymn for the wrathful spilled out in a thousand ink blotches.

I wanted to write the world's most beautiful poem.

Joaquín Sabina