THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN - by Jorge Luis Borges

THINGS THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

- by Jorge Luis Borges

I think of things that weren’t,
but might have been.

The treatise on Saxon myths
Bede never wrote.

The inconceivable work Dante might
have had a glimpse of,

As soon as he’d corrected the
Comedy’s last verse.

History without the afternoons of the Cross
and the hemlock.

History without the face
of Helen.

Man without the eyes that gave
us the moon.

On Gettysburg’s three days,
victory for the South.

The love we
never shared.

The wide empire the Vikings
chose not to found.

The world without the wheel
or the rose.

The view John Donne held
of Shakespeare.

The other horn
of the Unicorn.

The fabled Irish bird that lights
on two trees at once.

The child I never had.

* * *
- translated from the Argentine Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Argentinian writer, poet & critic