Oh destiny of Borges <br />to have sailed across the diverse seas of the world <br />or across that single and solitary sea of diverse <br />names, <br />to have been a part of Edinburgh, of Zurich, of the <br />two Cordobas, <br />of Colombia and of Texas, <br />to have returned at the end of changing generations <br />to the ancient lands of his forebears, <br />to Andalucia, to Portugal and to those counties <br />where the Saxon warred with the Dane and they <br />mixed their blood, <br />to have wandered through the red and tranquil <br />labyrinth of London, <br />to have grown old in so many mirrors, <br />to have sought in vain the marble gaze of the statues, <br />to have questioned lithographs, encyclopedias, <br />atlases, <br />to have seen the things that men see, <br />death, the sluggish dawn, the plains, <br />and the delicate stars, <br />and to have seen nothing, or almost nothing <br />except the face of a girl from Buenos Aires <br />a face that does not want you to remember it. <br />Oh destiny of Borges, <br />perhaps no stranger than your own.<br /><br />Jorge Luis Borges<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/elegy-3/
