The poem's speaker starts by describing a smell that lingers in fields where sugarcane is grown. It smells like blood and dead bodies, as if the scent of flowers has suddenly turned frightening. Among the palm trees, bodies are scattered in graves, not breathing and filling the open field with bones. Meanwhile, a finicky, hard-to-please government leader is chatting with a group of people, represented metaphorically as wineglasses, collars, and luxurious clothing. In the dictator's palace, everything is as shiny as the dials of a watch. Gloved laughter—or the laughter of people dressed in gloves and other expensive outfits—bounces through the halls of the palace.
The sounds of laughter mingle with the voices and mouths of the newly dead and buried. Away from the dictator's sight, people are grieving. Their grief falls like the pollen of a huge plant, whose leaves grow blindly even in the dark. As violent fighting fills the dangerous waters and as scales build on one another in the swamp, a snout becomes clogged with silence and mud. From this, hatred and vengeance are born.
