The Spanish March, on Mexico City, 1519

Thus they came causing great awe; thus they came causing great terror

My late father, Bill Bright, wrote a “translation poem” from an eyewitness account of the Spanish invasion of Mexico City — as described in the Florentine Codex 12:xi, by Fray Bernadindo de Sagagún, the first European ethnographer of the New World.

Bill studied Nahuatl and Aztec culture in Mexico as a 20-year-old, when he first visited Mexico City in 19…