by Pablo Neruda
of children from the happy South, a bowl
with explosions, with wild waters and ruins and fright,
a bowl with split axles and trampled heads,
a black bowl, a bowl of Almería blood.
Each morning, each turbid morning of your lives
you will have it steaming and burning at your tables:
you will push it aside a bit with your soft hands
so as not to see it, not to digest it so many times:
you will push it aside a bit between the bread and the grapes,
this bowl of silent blood
that will be there each morning, each
morning.
A bowl for the Colonel and the Colonel’s wife
at a garrison party, at each party,
above the oaths and the spittle, with the wine light of early
morning
so that you may see it trembling and cold upon the world.
Yes, a bowl for all of you, richmen here and there,
monstrous ambassadors, ministers, table companions,
ladies with cozy tea parties and chairs:
a bowl shattered, overflowing, dirty with the blood of the poor,
for each morning, for each week, forever and ever,
a bowl of Almería blood, facing you, forever.
OFFENDED LANDS
Regions submerged
in interminable martyrdom, through the unending
silence, pulses
of bee and exterminated rock,
you lands that instead of wheat and clover
bring signs of dried blood and crime:
abundant Galicia, pure as rain,
made salty forever by tears:
Extremadura, on whose august shore
of sky and aluminum, black as a bullet
hole, betrayed and wounded and shattered:
Badajoz without memory, among her dead sons
she lies watching a sky that remembers:
Málaga plowed by death
and pursued among the cliffs
until the maddened mothers
beat upon the rock with their newborn sons.
Furor, flight of mourning
and death and anger,
until the tears and grief now gathered,
until the words and the fainting and the anger
are only a pile of bones in a road
and a stone buried by the dust.
It is so much, so many
tombs, so much martyrdom, so much
galloping of beasts in the star!
Nothing, not even victory
will erase the terrible hollow of the blood:
nothing, neither the sea, nor the passage
of sand and time, nor the geranium flaming
upon the grave.
SANJURJO* IN HELL
Tied up, reeking, roped
to his betraying airplane, to his betrayals,
the betrayed betrayer burns.
Like phosphorus his kidneys burn
and his sinister betraying soldier’s
mouth melts in curses,
piloted through the eternal flames,
guided and burnt by airplanes,
burnt from betrayal to betrayal.
MOLA* IN HELL
The turbid Mola mule is dragged
from cliff to eternal cliff
and as the shipwrecked man goes from wave to wave,
destroyed by brimstone and horn,
boiled in lime and gall and deceit,
already expected in hell,
the infernal mulatto goes, the Mola mule
definitively turbid and tender,
with flames on his tail and his rump.
GENERAL FRANCO IN HELL
Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar
in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,
nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping with the voice of a
dead woman scratches your belly
seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,
will be for you anything but a dark demolished
door.
Indeed.
From one hell to another, what difference? In the howling
of your legions, in the holy milk
of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled
along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence,
a broken door.
Here you are. Wretched eyelid, dung
of sinister sepulchral hens, heavy sputum, figure
of treason that blood will not erase. Who, who are you,
oh miserable leaf of salt, oh dog of the earth,
oh ill-born pallor of shadow?
The flame retreats without ash,
the salty thirst of hell, the circles
of grief turn pale.
Cursed one, may only humans
pursue you, within the absolute fire of things may
you not be consumed, not be lost
in the scale of time, may you not be pierced by the burning glass
or the fierce foam.
Alone, alone, for the tears
all gathered, for an eternity of dead hands
and rotted eyes, alone in a cave
of your hell, eating silent pus and blood
through a cursed and lonely eternity.
You do not deserve to sleep
even though it be with your eyes fastened with pins:
you have to be
awake, General, eternally awake
among the putrefaction of the new mothers,
machine-gunned in the autumn. All and all the sad children
cut to pieces,
rigid, they hang, awaiting in your hell
that day of cold festivity: your arrival.
Children blackened by explosions,
red fragments of brain, corridors filled
with gentle intestines, they all await you, all in the
very posture
of crossing the street, of kicking the ball,
of swallowing a fruit, of smiling, or being born.
Smiling. There are smiles
now demolished by blood
that wait with scattered exterminated teeth
and masks of muddled matter, hollow faces
of perpetual gunpowder, and the nameless
ghosts, the dark
hidden ones, those who never left
their beds of rubble. They all wait for you
to spend the night. They fill the corridors
like decayed seaweed.
They are ours, they were our
flesh, our health, our
bustling peace, our ocean
of air and lungs. Through
them the dry earth flowered. Now, beyond the earth,
turned into destroyed
substance, murdered matter, dead flour,
they await you in your hell.
Since acute terror or sorrow waste away,
neither terror nor sorrow await you. May you be alone
and accursed,
alone and awake among all the dead,
and let blood fall upon you like rain,
and let a dying river of severed eyes
slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.
SONG ABOUT SOME RUINS
This that was created and tamed,
this that was moistened, used, seen,
lies—poor kerchief—among the waves
of earth and black brimstone.
Like bud or breast
they raise themselves to the sky, like the flower that rises
from the destroyed bone, so the shapes
of the world appeared. Oh eyelids,
oh columns, oh ladders.
Oh deep substances
annexed and pure: how long until you are bells!
how long until you are clocks! Aluminum
of blue proportions, cement
stuck to human dreams!
the gum, the mud, the objects grow
and the walls rise up
like arbors of dark human flesh.
Inside there in white, in copper,
in fire, in abandonment, the papers grew,
the abominable weeping, the prescriptions
taken at night to the drugstore while
someone with a fever,
the dry temple of the mind, the door
that man has built
never to open it.
Everything has gone and fallen
suddenly withered.
Wounded tools, nocturnal
cloths, dirty foam, urine just then
spilt, cheeks, glass, wool,
camphor, circles of thread and leather, all,
all through a wheel returned to dust,
to the disorganized dream of the metals,
all the perfume, all the fascination,
all united in nothing, all fallen
never to be born.
Celestial thirst, doves
with a waist of wheat: epochs
of pollen and branch: see how
the wood is shattered
until it reaches mourning: there are no roots
for man: all scarcely rests
upon a tremor of rain.
See how the guitar
has rotted in the mouth of the fragrant bride:
see how the words that built so much
now are extermination: upon the lime and among the shattered
marble, look
at the trace—now moss-covered—of the sob.
THE VICTORY OF THE ARMS OF THE PEOPLE
But, like earth’s memory, like the stony
splendor of metal and silence,
is your victory, people, fatherland, and grain.
Your riddled banner advances
like your breast above the scars
of time and earth.
THE UNIONS AT THE FRONT
Where are the miners, where are
the rope makers, the leather
curers, those who cast the nets?
Where are they?
Where are those who used to sing at the top
of the building, spitting and swearing
upon the lofty cement?
Where are the railroadmen
dedicated and nocturnal?
Where is the supplier’s union?
With a rifle, with a rifle. Among the
dark throbbing of the plainland,
looking out over the debris.
Aiming the bullet at the harsh
enemy as at the thorns,
as at the vipers, that’s it.
By day and by night, in the sad
ash of dawn, in the virtue
of the scorched noon.
TRIUMPH
Solemn is the triumph of the people.
At its great victorious passage
the eyeless potato and the heavenly
grape glitter in the earth.
LANDSCAPE AFTER A BATTLE
Bitten space, troop crushed
against the grain, broken
horseshoes, frozen between frost and stones,
harsh moon.
Moon of a wounded mare, charred,
wrapped in exhausted thorns, menacing, sunken
metal or bone, absence, bitter cloth,
smoke of gravediggers.
Behind the acrid halo of saltpeter,
from substance to substance, from water to water,
swift as threshed wheat,
burned and eaten.
Accidental crust softly soft,
black ash absent and scattered,
now only echoing cold, abominable
materials of rain.
May my knees keep it hidden
more than this fugitive territory,
may my eyelids grasp it until they can name and wound,
may my blood keep this taste of shadow
so that there will be no forgetting.
ANTITANKERS
Branches all of classic mother-of-pearl, halos
of sea and sky, wind of laurels
for you, oaken heroes,
antitankers.
You have been in the night mouth
of war
the angels of fire, the fearsome ones,
the pure sons of the earth.
That’s how you were, planted
in the fields, dark, like seeds, lying
waiting. And before the hurricaned iron, at the chest
of the monster,
you launched not just a pale bit of explosive
but your deep steaming heart,
a lash as destructive and blue as gunpowder.
You rose up,
noble, heavenly against the mountains
of cruelty, naked sons
of earth and glory.
Once you saw
only the olive branch, only the nets
filled with scales and silver: you gathered
the instruments, the wood, the iron
of the harvests and the building:
in your hands flourished the beautiful
forest pomegranate or the morning
onion, and suddenly
you are here laden with lightning,
clutching glory, bursting
with furious powers,
alone and harsh facing the darkness.
Liberty sought you out in the mines,
and begged for peace for your ploughs:
Liberty rose weeping
along the roads, shouted in the corridors
of the houses: in the countryside
her voice passed between orange and wind
calling for ripe-hearted men, and you came,
and here you are, the chosen
sons of victory, many times fallen, your hands
many times blotted out, broken the most hidden bones,
your mouths
stilled, pounded
to destruction your silence:
but you surged up suddenly, in the midst
of the whirlwind, again, others, all
your unfathomable, your burning
race of hearts and roots.
MADRID (1937)
At this hour I remember everything and everyone,
vigorously, sunkenly in
the regions that—sound and feather—
striking a little, exist
beyond the earth, but on the earth. Today a new winter begins.
There is in that city,
where lies what I love,
there is no bread, no light: a cold windowpane falls
upon dry geraniums. By night black dreams
opened by howitzers, like bloody oxen:
no one in the dawn of the ramparts
but a broken cart: now moss, now silence of ages,
instead of swallows, on the burned houses,
drained of blood, empty, their doors open to the sky:
now the market begins to open its poor emeralds,
and the oranges, the fish,
brought each day across the blood,
offer themselves to the hands of the sister and the widow.
City of mourning, undermined, wounded,
broken, beaten, bullet-riddled, covered
with blood and broken glass, city without night, all
night and silence and explosions and heroes,
now a new winter more naked and more alone,
now without flour, without steps, with your moon
of soldiers.
Everything, everyone.
Poor sun, our lost
blood, terrible heart
shaken and mourned. Tears like heavy bullets
have fallen on your dark earth sounding
like falling doves, a hand that death
closes forever, blood of each day
and each night and each week and each
month. Without speaking of you, heroes a
sleep
and awake, without speaking of you who make the water
and the earth
tremble with your glorious purpose,
at this hour I listen to the weather on a street,
someone speaks to me, winter
comes again to the hotels
where I have lived,
everything is city that I listen to and distance
surrounded by fire as if by a spume
of vipers assaulted by a
water of hell.
For more than a year now
the masked ones have been touching your human shore
and dying at the contact of your electric blood:
sacks of Moors, sacks of traitors
have rolled at your feet of stone: neither smoke nor death
have conquered your burning walls.
Then,
what’s happening, then? Yes, they are the exterminators,
they are the devourers: they spy on you, white city,
the bishop of turbid scruff, the fecal and feudal
young masters, the general in whose hand
jingle thirty coins: against your walls are
a circle of women, dripping and devout,
a squadron of putrid ambassadors,
and a sad vomit of military dogs.
Praise to you, praise in cloud, in sunray,
in health, in swords,
bleeding front whose thread of blood
echoes on the deeply wounded stones,
a slipping away of harsh sweetness,
bright cradle armed with lightning,
fortress substance, air of blood
from which bees are born.
Today you who live, Juan,
today you who watch, Pedro, who conceive, sleep, eat:
today in the lightless night on guard without sleep
and without rest,
alone on the cement, across the gashed earth,
from the blackened wire, to the South, in the middle, all around,
without sky, without mystery,
men like a collar of cordons defend
the city surrounded by flames: Madrid hardened