Maya King at Mérida’s Palacio Canton Museum

After being conquered by the Spanish, the Maya of Yucatán wrote a series of miscellanies in the 17th and 18th centuries referred to as Chilam Balam. Many of the entries are poetic and filled with foreboding. Poet Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno translated a number of them in his The Destruction of the Jaguar: Poems from the Books of Chilam Balam. Here is one of them:

Napuctum Speaks

Burn, burn, burn
on earth we shall burn
become cinders in
the blowing wind
drift over the land
over the mountains
out to sea.

What has been written
will be fulfilled.
What has been spoken
will come to be.

Weep, weep, weep
but know,
know well:
Ash does not suffer.