in the presidio of an enslaved almond,
or in the hanging prison of a finch.
To kiss you was to kiss a wasp’s nest
that nails me to torment and unnails
me and digs a burial pit, and digs
down into my heart where I die.
No, I won’t go along: that would be to worship
too much the vision of your kiss,
to follow the curse of your fragrance.
One buried alive in crying,
a revolution in bone,
I’m a lightning bolt, subject to a bottle.
Like the Bull
Like the bull I was born for mourning
and pain, like the bull I am branded
with a hellish iron in my side,
and, being male, by the fruit of my groin.
Like the bull my excessive heart
finds everything too small,
and in love with a face, a kiss,
like the bull I need to fight for your love.
Like the bull, I am puffed up by punishment,
my tongue is bathed in my heart’s blood,
and my neck is collared by a roaring gale.
Like the bull I follow and chase you,
and you leave my desire on the sword,
like the taunted bull, like the bull.
Gardeners Go Down the Path
Gardeners go down the path
in the sacred hour of coming home,
their blood damaged by the weight
of winter, spring, and summer.
They come from superhuman efforts
and go on to a song, a kiss,
leaving dug into the air
the smell of tools and hands.
I take another path, another path
that leads not to a kiss, though it is time,
but instead a path that wanders, aimless.
With a tragic, frightful face
a bull cries alone by the river,
forgets that he is a bull, and virile.
Death, in a Bull’s Pelt
Death, in a bull’s pelt,
full of the holes and horns of its own
undoing, grazes and tramples
a bullfighter’s luminous field.
Volcanic roaring, ferocious snorting,
all from a general love for everything born—
Yet the eruptions that flare
kill peaceful ranchers.
Now, ravenous love-starved beast,
you may come graze my heart’s tragic grasses,
if you like its bitter aspects.
Like you, I am tormented by loving so much,
and my heart, dressed in a dead man’s clothes,
winds over it all.
Elegy
In Orihuela, his town and mine, like lightning
death took Ramón Sijé, whom I so loved
I wish I was the gardener whose tears
water the earth you fill and fertilize,
my closest friend, so suddenly.
With my useless grief nourishing the rains,
the snails, and the body’s organs,
I shall feed your heart
to the wasting poppies.
Grief bunches up in my ribs
until just breathing is painful.
A hard punch, a frozen fist,
an invisible, homicidal ax-blow,
a brutal shove has knocked you down.
Nothing gapes wider than my wound.
I cry over this disaster, over everything,
and feel your death more than my life.
I walk over the stubble of the dead,
and without warmth or consolation from anyone
I leave my heart behind, and mind my business.
Death flew off with you too soon,
dawn dawned too soon,
you were put into earth too soon.
I won’t forgive lovestruck death,
I won’t forgive this indifferent life,
I won’t forgive the earth, or anything.
In my hands a torrent of rocks
is brewing, lightning, vicious axes,
thirsting and starved for catastrophe.
I want to carve up the earth with my teeth,
I want to break up the earth chunk by chunk
in dry fiery mouthfuls.
I want to mine the earth till I find you,
and can kiss your noble skull,
ungag and revive you.
You’ll come back to my orchard, and my fig tree:
high up in the blossoms your soul
will flutter its wings, gathering
the wax and honey of angelic hives.
You’ll come back to the plow’s lullaby
of lovestruck farmhands.
You’ll bring light to my darkened face,
and your blood will have to pulse back and forth
between your bride and the bees.
My greedy lovesick voice
calls your heart, now crumpled velvet,
to a field of frothy almond sprays.
I call you to come to the flying souls
of the milky blossoms because
we have so many things to talk about,
my friend, my very best friend.
Bloody Fate
I come, blood on blood,
like the sea, wave on wave.
I have a soul the color of poppies.
The luckless poppy is my destiny,
from poppy to poppy I come
to fall on the horns of my fate.
A creature must grow
from the seedbed of nothing,
and more than one turns up
under the design of an angry star,
under a troubled and bad moon.
The brushstroke
of a bloodstained foot fell
over my wound,
a planet of fired-up saffron fell,
an enraged red cloud fell,
a badly wounded ocean fell, a sky.
I came with the knife’s pain,
a knife was waiting when I got here.
They suckled me on the milk of the bitter-apple,
the juice of a crazy, murderous blade,
and when my eyes opened to the sun for the first time
the first thing I saw was a wound,
and that was bad luck.
Vivid, ferocious flood, which formed me,
and chases me down.
Before I even had a name
my mother shoved me into this ravening land,
threw me onto my feet, and onto my side,
pushed me harder each time, toward the grave.
I fight with blood, I argue
with the pounding of bodies, with all those veins,
and each body I bump into and contend with
is one more cauldron of blood, one more chain.
Though they are light, barbs of pain
mount up like badges on my chest:
That’s where love of farming wounds me,
and my deeply fallowed soul
has furrowed my hope with untreatable wounds
from the death agony of its plow.
All the implements
lie in wait for me:
the hatchet has left
secret signs for me,
stones, desires, and days
have excavated wellsprings inside my body
that, by themselves, swallow up sand
and melancholy.
The chains get stronger each time,
the snakes get stronger each time,
its power is greater and crueler,
the enveloping rings stronger,
stronger the heart, my heart.
In its vacuum-thick domicile—
the only place these visitations occur—
I keep a handful of letters and inscribed passions,
a jot of blood, and death.
Ay, frothing blood,
ay, roaring purple climber,
verdict at all hours resounding
from beneath my head’s long-suffering anvil!
Blood has given me birth, and jail.
Blood dissolves me and swells me up.
I am a building constructed of blood and plaster
that demolishes and rebuilds itself
on a bone scaffolding.
A bricklayer in blood, dying blood,
washes and hangs out his shirt each day
not far from my eye,
and each night, with my soul,
and even with my eyelids, I gather it all back in.
Blood blooms, spreads
its wide foliage in my chest,
its brimming poplar grows wild
and falls violently undone into several fierce rivers.
Suddenly I see
that I am drowning in its angry torrents,
and I swim desperately against them
as if against a lethal stream of daggers.
The current drags me till it is glutted,
it tears me to pieces, sinks me, tramples me.
I wish I could haul myself away from its blows,
hoist my arms out of it,
draw the pain from my arms.
It will quit dragging me to pieces,
now that it ordains my life,
blood and its tide,
bodies, my bloody star.
I will be one dilated wound,
distended till there is
a corpse of foam: wind and nothing.
I Have Lots of Heart
Today I am, I don’t know, I don’t know how,
today I am here only to suffer,
today I have no friends,
today I have only the desire
to rip my heart out by the roots
and crush it under my shoe.
Today that dry thorn is blossoming,
today is a day of crying in my kingdom,
today dejection unloads in my chest
a dejected lead weight.
I can’t handle my fate.
And I look for death at my own hand,
I look lovingly at razor blades,
and I remember that friendly hatchet,
and I think about the tallest steeples
for taking a fatal jump, serenely.
If it weren’t for...I don’t know what,
my heart would write one last note,
a note I carry hidden there,
I would make an inkwell of my heart,
a fountain of syllables, goodbyes, and presents,
and I’d say to the world, you stay here.
I was born under a bad moon.
My grief is that I have one grief
which outweighs all the joy there is.
A love affair has left me with my arms hung low
and I can’t stretch them out any more.
Don’t you see my disappointed mouth?
How inconsolable my eyes are?
The more I look inside myself, the more I mourn:
Cut out this pain? With what shears?
Yesterday, tomorrow, today,
suffering for it all
my heart is a sad fishbowl,
a cage of dying nightingales.
I have lots of heart.
Today I dishearten myself.
I have more heart than anybody,
and for all that, I have more bitterness, too.
I don’t know why, I don’t know why or how
I let my life go on each day.
Poems of War (1936–1939)
INCLUDING POEMS FROM
Wind from the People
(Viento del pueblo, 1937)
The Man Who Lies in Wait
(El hombre acecha, 1939)
Sitting Upon the Dead
Sitting upon the dead
who fell silent these two months,
I kiss empty shoes
and make an angry fist
with my heart’s hand
and the soul that supports it.
That my voice climb the hills
and fall to earth in thunder—
this is what my throat demands
from now on, forever.
Come close as I cry out,
people of the same milk,
tree whose roots
have trapped me,
because I am here to defend you,
with my blood and mouth
like two faithful rifles.
If I came from the earth,
if I was given birth
from a miserable, impoverished womb,
it was only to be made into
misery’s nightingale,
an echo of bad luck,
to sing again and again,
to those who must hear,
of suffering, of the poor,
of the land.
Yesterday the town woke up
naked with nothing to wear,
hungry with nothing to eat,
and today dawns
in storm, understandably,
in blood, understandably.
Guns in their hands
want to turn into lions
to finish off the beasts
who have so often been beasts.
Even if you have no weapons,
people of a hundred thousand strengths,
don’t let your bones fold—
punish whoever wounds you
while you still have fists,
fingernails, and spit, and still have
hearts, organs, guts,
balls and teeth.
Angry as the angry wind,
light as the light air,
murder those who murder,
hate those who hate
the peace in your hearts
and the wombs of your women.
Don’t let them knife you in the back,
go at them face to face and die
with your chests to the bullets
as wide as a wall.
I sing in grief’s voice,
my people, for your heroes:
your misfortunes that come
in the same metal and weeping as mine,
your suffering, in the same grain
as mine and of the same wood,
your thought and my mind,
your heart and my blood,
your pain and my honor.
Life, for me, is
a barricade before emptiness.
I am here to live
while my soul still resounds,
and here to die,
when the hour comes,
in the wellsprings of my people,
from now on, forever.
Life is a lot to swallow;
death is just one gulp.
Sweat
Water drinks its paradise in the sea,
and sweat finds horizon, uproar, crest.
Sweat is a brimming salty tree,
a greedy surf.
To offer the land its trembling cup
sweat reaches from earth’s farthest age,
feeds thirst and salt drop by drop,
to kindle life.
Sun’s cousin, tear’s brother, motion’s child,
April to October, winter to summer,
it goes rolling through the field
in golden vines.
As peasants pass through dawn
behind the plow that uproots their sleep,
they each wear a silent workshirt brown
with mute sweat.
The workers’ golden robe,
jewel of the hands and eyes as well,
through the haze the axilla’s shower
spreads a fecund smell.
The land’s flavor grows ripe and rich:
flakes that hardworking, pungent weeping yields,
manna of the men and fields,
my forehead’s drink.
You who never feel stiff or sweat,
at leisure with n
o arms, music, pores,
will never feel the open pores’ wet
halo, or the power of the bulls.
You will live stinking, die snuffed out:
fiery beauty takes up life in the heels
of bodies whose working limbs shift about
like constellations.
Comrades, surrender your foreheads to work:
sweat, with its sword of tasty crystal,
with its sticky flood, makes you transparent,
lucky, equal.
Hunger
I
Keep hunger in mind: remember its past
trampled with foremen who pay you in lead.
That wage is paid in blood received,
with a yoke on the soul, and blows to the back.
Hunger paraded its caved-in cows,
its dried-up women, its devoured teats,
its gaping jawbones, its miserable lives
past the strapping bodies of those who eat.
The abundant years, the satiety, the glut
were only for those who get called boss.
I am here, we are here, to make sure that bread
goes straight to the teeth of the hungry poor.
Maybe we can’t be those at the front
who understand life as bloody war-booty:
like sharks, all greed and tooth,
or eager panthers in a world always starving.
Years of hunger have been, for the poor, the only years.
Quantities of bread were heaped up for others,
and hunger wolfed down its ravenous flocks
of crows, clawed things, wolves, scorpions.
I fight, famished, with all my gashes,
scars and wounds, souvenirs and memories
of hunger, against all those smug bellies:
hogs who were born more lowly than hogs.
For having engorged yourselves so basely and brutally,
wallowing deeper than pigs at play,
you will be plunged into this huge current
of blazing spikes, of menacing fists.
You have not wanted to open your ears to hear
the weeping of millions of young workers.
You just pay lip service, when hunger comes to the door
begging with the mouths of the very stars.
In every house: hatred, like a grove of fig trees,
like a quaking bull with shaking horns
breaking loose from the barn, circling, waiting,
and doing you in on its horns as you agonize like dogs.
II
Hunger is the most important thing to know:
to be hungry is the first lesson we learn.
And the ferocity of what you feel,
there where the stomach begins, sets you on fire.
You aren’t so human that you won’t strangle
doves one day without a bad conscience: