Miguel Hernandez
Page 5
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.”