Cantares Mexicanos

Flower and song: that was the Nahua name for poetry, in xochitl in cuicatl, two bright things that blaze and are gone. The singers of these Nahuatl verses circle one unanswerable question, whether it is true that anyone truly lives on the earth, and they answer it in jade, in quetzal feathers, in blossoms that wither in the hand. Not forever here, they say, only a little while. We come to sleep, we come only to dream. They sang and danced these songs in a world the Spanish conquest was already ending, and the grief of that ending presses through even the verses that never name it. Copied out by Nahua scribes into a single manuscript kept in Mexico City, these songs are nearly all that remains of a whole civilization's lyric voice. Their singers were certain that nothing on earth endures. That we are still listening is the tenderest rebuke to everything they believed.