Miguel Hernandez

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by Miguel Hernandez


  In your arms, where freedom

  for the two of us beats like a heart.

  I am free. Feel me free!

  Just for love!

  After Love

  We could not be. The earth

  could not be enough. We are not

  so much as the sun intended

  in its distant yearning.

  One foot approaches the light.

  The other insists on darkness.

  Because love doesn’t last forever

  in anyone, including me.

  Hatred waits for its moment

  in the coal’s deepest core.

  Hatred is red and eats itself up.

  Love is pale, and solitary.

  Tired of hating, I love you.

  Tired of loving, I hate you.

  Time rains; it rains.

  And one sad day among them all,

  sad for the whole earth,

  sad from me to the wolf,

  we sleep and wake up

  with a tiger in our eyes.

  Rocks, men like rocks,

  hard and full of hostility,

  collide in the air, where

  rocks suddenly collide.

  Loneliness, which pulled them apart today,

  and yesterday shoved their faces together.

  Loneliness, which in a kiss

  holds back a deafening roar.

  Lonely forever.

  Helplessly lonely.

  Bodies like a voracious sea,

  thrashing, furious.

  Lonely, tied together

  by love, by hate,

  they spurt through veins,

  they cross grimly through cities.

  In the heart everything lonely

  takes root.

  Footsteps with no land in them are left behind

  as if they’re in water, on the bottom.

  Only one voice, so distant,

  I always hear it distantly,

  forces you on, tags along

  like a neck on the shoulders.

  Only one voice snatches me

  from this bony scaffolding

  for the receding and bristling down

  I clothe myself in.

  The dry winds cannot

  dry out the luscious oceans.

  And the heart goes on

  fresh in its harvest-time jail

  because this voice is the current’s

  tenderest weapon:

  “Miguel, I’ve remembered you

  since the sun and dust,

  since before the moon itself,

  tomb of a loving dream.”

  Love: it separates my existence

  from its first ruins,

  and constructing me, pronounces

  one truth like a gust of wind.

  After love, the earth.

  After the earth, everything.

  War

  All the mothers of the world

  hide their wombs, shiver,

  and wish they could retreat

  into blind virginity,

  into that lonely beginning

  and the orphan past.

  Virginity is left

  pale, afraid.

  The sea howls thirst, and the thirsty

  earth howls to be water.

  Hatred’s flame lashes out,

  and the commotion slams doors shut.

  Voices tremble like lances,

  voices like bayonets.

  Mouths show up like fists,

  fists arrive like hooves.

  Breasts like hoarse walls,

  legs like rough haunches.

  The heart thumps,

  churns, bursts.

  It tosses unexpected black spume

  into the eyes.

  Blood pulls itself up through the body,

  blows off the head

  and looks outside for a body, a wound

  to eject itself through.

  Blood travels the world

  caged, unsatisfied.

  Flowers shrivel,

  devoured by the grass.

  Lust for murder invades

  the lily’s heart.

  All the bodies yearn

  to be welded to chunks of metal:

  to be married, possessed horribly.

  To vanish: universal

  fear, spreading, rules everything.

  Ghostly banners,

  an imaginary flag,

  a myth of nations: the

  grave fiction of borders.

  Exasperated music,

  tough as boots, scuffs up

  the face of every hope,

  of each fragile core.

  The soul crackles: rage.

  Tears burst like lightning.

  Why do I want any light,

  just to stumble into darkness?

  Passions like bugles,

  ballads, trumpets that tell

  the living to consume the living,

  to rip each other down brick by brick.

  Neighing. Explosions. Thunder.

  Spit. Kisses. Wheels.

  Spurs. Crazy swords

  tear open one huge wound.

  Then silence, mute

  as cotton, white as gauze,

  purple as surgery.

  Silence. And laurel

  in a corner full of bones.

  And a lovestruck drum,

  like a tense womb, beats

  behind the uncounted

  dead man who never gets away.

  War

  Old age in the villages.

  The heart with no master.

  Love with no object.

  Grass, dust, crow.

  And children?

  In the coffin.

  The tree alone and dry.

  Woman like a log

  of widowhood lying on the bed.

  Incurable hatred.

  And children?

  In the coffin.

  Everything Is Filled with You

  Everything is filled with you,

  and everything is filled with me:

  the towns are full,

  just as the cemeteries are full

  of you, all the houses

  are full of me, all the bodies.

  I wander down streets losing

  things I gather up again:

  parts of my life

  that have turned up from far away.

  I wing myself toward agony,

  I see myself dragging

  through a doorway,

  through creation’s latent depths.

  Everything is filled with me:

  with something yours and memory

  lost, yet found

  again, at some other time.

  A time left behind

  decidedly black,

  indelibly red,

  golden on your body.

  Pierced by your hair,

  everything is filled with you,

  with something I haven’t found,

  but look for among your bones.

  Daytime’s Animal

  Daytime’s animal

  looks for those of the night.

  The sun moves far away,

  the moon is nearby.

  Animal of noon,

  midnight agitates you.

  The sun goes away.

  The moon is nearby.

  Child of the Night

  Laughing, playing, bright like day,

  the child I twice wanted to be fell into night.

  He didn’t want light any more. What for? He would never

  emerge from those silences again, from that gloom.

  I wanted to be...What for? I want to reach, joyously,

  the center of the sphere of everything there is.

  I wanted to take a smile, the most beautiful thing, with me.

  I died smiling, serenely sad.

  Child twice a child: three times coming.

  Go back, churning through the womb’s opaque world.

  Back, love. Back, child, because I don’t
want

  to come out where light finds its great sadness.

  I return to the plastic air that inspired my unconsciousness.

  I churn again, conscious of the sleep that blankets me.

  In a sensitive shadow of transparency,

  an intimate space churning from October to October.

  Womb: core flesh of everything there is.

  Eternal cave, dark, whether red or blue.

  Final night, in whose depth one feels

  the roots’ voice, altitude’s breath.

  I push ahead under your skin, and distance is blood.

  My body pushes through in a thick constellation.

  The universe crowds together its errant echoes,

  there where the history of humanity is written.

  Looking at, seeing around the solitude, the mountain,

  the sea, through the window of an entire heart,

  which grieved yesterday at not being a horizon

  open to a world less mutable and transient.

  A stone and a child grow for nothing.

  To live darkly, without wings, for a day.

  Terrible circumscribed pyramid of salt,

  with neither fire nor coolness. No. Go back, life.

  Yet something has shoved me desperately ahead.

  I tumble through the dawn of time, and the past.

  I am thrown from night into the stinging light,

  I am crying again—tiny, regressed.

  Imagination’s Tomb

  A mason wanted...Oh, he had guts.

  A mason wanted, stone on stone, wall

  after wall, to raise an image to the wind,

  to be the one who unleashes the future.

  He wanted a structure capable of the lightest thing.

  He had guts. He really wanted it!

  Stones made of feathers, walls made of birds—

  an imagination lifted them into the noon sun.

  He laughed. Worked. Sang. From his arms,

  stronger than thunder’s wing,

  walls flew out like wingbeats.

  Though wingbeats don’t last as long.

  At last, stone was his agent. And a mountain,

  if it really moves, is able to fly.

  Stone by stone, it weighs down and crushes

  all it occupies, even a world of live desire.

  A mason wanted...But stone earns

  its grim brutal density in a second.

  That man tooled his own jail. And in his work

  he and the wind were thrown together.

  Ascension of the Broom

  Crowned with laurel, myrtle, and rose, the broom

  is heroic to those who face rubbish.

  To free everything from flightless dust it came down,

  made of palm leaf and blue, from above.

  Its passion, like a careless young sword’s, never rests.

  Thin from anxiety, purity, sun, and courage,

  a white lily that sweeps the very grave,

  it grows taller, warmer, purer with each stroke.

  Never! The broom will never be crucified,

  because youth passes along its skeleton,

  a lone flute, mute yet resounding.

  It is a lone, sublime tongue, in tune.

  And in its quick breath, the quiet dust flies off

  and ascends a palm tree, column toward dawn.

  Eternal Darkness

  I who thought that light was mine

  see myself thrown headlong into dark.

  A solar ember, astral joy

  fiery with sea-foam and light and desire.

  My blood is weightless, round, pomegranate:

  a torrent of yearning without border or penumbra.

  Outside, light is buried in light.

  Only darkness gives me the sensation of light.

  Only darkness. Which leaves no trace. Or sky.

  Beings. Shapes. Real bodies

  in the flightless air,

  in the tree of impossible things.

  Livid frowns, grief’s passions.

  Teeth thirsting to turn red.

  The darkness of pure malice.

  Bodies like blind, plugged wells.

  Not enough room. Laughter has sunk low.

  To fly high is impossible.

  My heart wishes it could beat strong enough

  to dilate the constricting blackness.

  My aimless flesh billows

  into the barren, sinister night:

  Who could be a ray of sunlight, invading it?

  I look. I find not even a trace of day.

  Just the glitter of clenched fists,

  the splendor of teeth ready to snap.

  Teeth and fists everywhere.

  Like great hands, mountains close in on me.

  Fighting with no thirst for morning muddies things.

  Such vastness, filled with dark heartbeats!

  I am a prison whose window

  opens to huge roaring solitudes.

  I am an open window, waiting

  as life goes darkly by.

  Yet there is a streak of sunlight in battle

  which always leaves the shadow vanquished.

  I Move Forward in the Dark

  I move forward in the dark, full of light: does day exist?

  Is this my grave, or is it my mother’s womb?

  Something pounds against my skin like a cold

  stone that turns warmer, redder, more tender.

  It’s possible that I haven’t been born yet,

  or that I’ve always been dead. Darkness is in charge.

  If this is life, then I don’t know what death would be,

  or whatever can come from such interminable anguish.

  Imprisoned as I am in such clothing, I seem to be pushed

  ahead naked, freed from something that can’t be me,

  that leaves my expression troubled, absent.

  But this black fabric, so extensive, moves with me

  shadow on shadow, and against the shadow

  that surrounds bare life, which ripens from nothing.

  Lullaby of the Onion

  dedicated to his son, after receiving a letter from his wife in which she said she had nothing to eat but bread and onions

  The onion is frost

  shut in and poor.

  Frost of your days

  and of my nights.

  Hunger and onion,

  black ice and frost

  large and round.

  My little boy

  was in hunger’s cradle.

  He was nursed

  on onion blood.

  But your blood

  is frosted with sugar,

  onion and hunger.

  A dark woman

  dissolved in moonlight

  pours herself thread by thread

  into the cradle.

  Laugh, son,

  you can swallow the moon

  when you want to.

  Lark of my house,

  keep laughing.

  The laughter in your eyes

  is the light of the world.

  Laugh so much

  that my soul, hearing you,

  will beat in space.

  Your laughter frees me,

  gives me wings.

  It sweeps away my loneliness,

  knocks down my cell.

  Mouth that flies,

  heart that turns

  to lightning on your lips.

  Your laughter is

  the sharpest sword,

  conqueror of flowers

  and larks.

  Rival of the sun.

  Future of my bones

  and of my love.

  The flesh fluttering,

  the sudden eyelid,

  and the baby is rosier

  than ever.

  How many linnets

  take off, wings fluttering,

  from your body!

  I woke up from childhood:

  don’t you wake up.<
br />
  I have to frown:

  always laugh.

  Keep to your cradle,

  defending laughter

  feather by feather.

  Yours is a flight so high,

  so wide,

  that your body is a sky

  newly born.

  If only I could climb

  to the origin

  of your flight!

  Eight months old you laugh

  with five orange blossoms.

  With five little

  ferocities.

  With five teeth

  like five young

  jasmine blossoms.

  They will be the frontier

  of tomorrow’s kisses

  when you feel your teeth

  as weapons,

  when you feel a flame

  running under your gums

  driving toward the center.

  Fly away, son, on the double

  moon of the breast:

  it is saddened by onion,

  you are satisfied.

  Don’t let go.

  Don’t find out what’s happening,

  or what goes on.

  Goodbye, Brothers

  The following lines were found after Hernández’s death, scribbled on the wall above his cot.

  Goodbye, brothers, comrades, friends,

  let me take my leave of the sun and the fields.

  Poets on Hernández

  Octavio Paz

  Federico García Lorca

  Pablo Neruda

  Rafael Alberti

  Vicente Aleixandre

  Octavio Paz

  Remember That Voice

  Miguel Hernández has died in prison in the village where he was born. He has died alone in a hostile Spain, the enemy of a Spain where he spent his youth, the antagonist of a Spain that rang out with his generosity. Let others curse his torturers; let others study and analyze his poetry. I want to remember him as he was.

  I first saw him in 1937, singing Spanish folk songs. He had a deep voice, somewhat ragged, somewhat like an innocent animal: he sounded like the countryside, like a low echo in the valleys, like a stone falling into a ravine. He had dark hazel eyes, bright eyes, with nothing twisted or intellectual about them; his mouth, like his hands and his heart, was large, and like them, simple and meaty, made of clay by pure and clumsy hands; of average height, robust, he was graceful, with a grace that rested in the blood and in the muscles, with the solemn grace of the earth; one could see that he was closer to the somber colts and the melancholy young bulls than to those tormented intellectuals who were his friends; his head was almost shaved and he wore corduroy pants and espadrilles; he looked like a soldier or a peasant. In that hotel in Valencia, full of smoke and vanity, and also full of genuine passion, Miguel Hernández sang in his deep voice and his singing was as though all the trees were singing. It was as though a single tree, the tree of a newborn and millennial Spain, had begun to sing its songs again. Not a poplar, not an olive, not an oak, not an apple, not an orange, but all the trees together, blending their sap and smells and leaves into that tree of flesh and voice. It is impossible to remember him with words; more than in memory, “he is written in the flavor of time.”

 

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