smellincoffee
16th November 2010, 05:37
Jack London had his socialist revolutionary leader in The Iron Heel recite a particular poem: I coped and posted it at my blog, but since I can't link to it at present here it is below. This is from page 184-186 of the 1907 edition.
"He was fond of quoting a fragment from a certain poem. He had never seen the whole poem, and he had tried vainly to learn its authorship. I give here the fragment, not alone because he loved it, but because it epitomized the paradox that he was in the spirit of him, and his conception of his spirit. For how can a man, with thrilling, and burning, and exaltation, recite the following and still be mere moral earth, a bit of fugitive force, an evanescent form? Here it is:
`Joy upon joy and gain upon gain
Are the destined rights of my birth,
And I shout the praise of my endless days
To the echoing edge of the earth.
Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die
To the uttermost end of time,
I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss,
In every age and clime—
The froth of Pride, the tang of Power,
The sweet of Womanhood!
I drain the lees upon my knees,
For oh, the draught is good;
I drink to Life, I drink to Death,
And smack my lips with song,
For when I die, another `I’ shall pass the cup along.
`The man you drove from Eden’s grove
Was I, my Lord, was I,
And I shall be there when the earth and the air
Are rent from sea to sky;
For it is my world, my gorgeous world,
The world of my dearest woes,
From the first faint cry of the newborn
To the rack of the woman’s throes.
`Packed with the pulse of an unborn race,
Torn with a world’s desire,
The surging flood of my wild young blood
Would quench the judgment fire.
I am Man, Man, Man, from the tingling flesh
To the dust of my earthly goal,
From the nestling gloom of the pregnant womb
To the sheen of my naked soul.
Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh
The whole world leaps to my will,
And the unslaked thirst of an Eden cursed
Shall harrow the earth for its fill.
Almighty God, when I drain life’s glass
Of all its rainbow gleams,
The hapless plight of eternal night
Shall be none too long for my dreams.
`The man you drove from Eden’s grove
Was I, my Lord, was I,
And I shall be there when the earth and the air
Are rent from sea to sky;
For it is my world, my gorgeous world,
The world of my dear delight,
From the brightest gleam of the Arctic stream
To the dusk of my own love-night.’ “
Rakhmetov
18th November 2010, 19:25
The Chileans were miners who were exploited. They looked to Fidel Castro & Che Guevara
XIX
To Fidel Castro
(by Pablo Neruda, Nobel Laureate, Song of Protest)
Fidel, Fidel, the people are grateful
for words in action and deeds that sing,
that is why I bring from far
a cup of my country’s wine:
it is the blood of a subterranean people
that from the shadows reaches your throat,
they are miners who have lived for centuries
extracting fire from the frozen land.
They go beneath the sea for coal
but on returning they are like ghosts:
they grew accustomed to eternal night,
the working-day light was robbed from them,
nevertheless here is the cup
of so much suffering and distances:
the happiness of imprisoned men
possessed by darkness and illusions
who from the inside of mines perceive
the arrival of spring and its fragrances
because they know that Man is struggling
to reach the amplest clarity.
And Cuba is seen by the Southern miners,
the lonely sons of la pampa,
the shepherds of cold in Patagonia,
the fathers of tin and silver,
the ones who marry cordilleras
extract the copper from Chuquicamata,
men hidden in buses
in populations of pure nostalgia,
women of the fields and workshops,
children who cried away their childhoods:
this is the cup, take it, Fidel.
It is full of so much hope
that upon drinking you will know your victory
is like the aged wine of my country
made not by one man but by many men
and not by one grape but by many plants:
it is not one drop but many rivers:
not one captain but many battles.
And they support you because you represent
the collective honor of our long struggle,
and if Cuba were to fall we would all fall,
and we would come to lift her,
and if she blooms with flowers
she will flourish with our own nectar.
And if they dare touch Cuba’s
forehead, by your hands liberated,
they will find people’s fists,
we will take out our buried weapons:
blood and pride will come to rescue,
to defend our beloved Cuba.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
United Fruit Co.
by poet Pablo Neruda (Nobel Laureate) from Canto General
When the trumpet blared everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehova distributed the world
to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors and other entities:
United Fruit Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest,
the central seaboard of my land,
America's sweet waist.
It rebabtized its lands
the "Banana Republics,"
and upon the slumbering corpses,
upon the restless heroes
who conquered renown,
freedom, flags,
it established the comic opera:
it alienated self-destiny,
regaled Caesar's crowns,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the tyrannical reign of the flies:
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carías flies, Martínez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soaked
in humble blood and jam,
drunken flies that drone
over the common graves,
circus flies, clever flies
versed in tyranny.
Among the bloodthirsty flies
the Fruit Co. disembarks,
ravaging coffee and fruits
for its ships that spirit away
our submerged lands' treasures
like serving trays.
Meanwhile, in the seaports'
sugary abysses,
Indians collapsed, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls down, a nameless
thing, a fallen number,
a bunch of lifeless fruit
dumped in the rubbish heap.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Between what I see and what I say
(Octavio Paz, Nobel Laureate)
Between what I see and what I say
Between what I say and what I keep silent
Between what I keep silent and what I dream
Between what I dream and what I forget:
poetry.
It slips
between yes and no,
says
what I keep silent,
keeps silent
what I say,
dreams
what I forget.
It is not speech:
it is an act.
It is an act
of speech.
Poetry
speaks and listens:
it is real.
And as soon as I say
it is real,
it vanishes.
Is it then more real?
Tangible idea,
Intangible
word:
poetry
comes and goes.
Between what is
And what is not.
It weaves
And unweaves reflections.
Poetry
Scatters eyes on a page,
Scatters words on our eyes.
Eyes speak,
Words look,
Looks think.
To hear
Thoughts,
See
What we say,
Touch
The body of an idea.
Eyes close,
The words open.
----------------------------------------------------
Sandino
(by Pablo Neruda from his collection of verse Canto General XXXVII)
It was when the crosses
were buried
in our land--- they were spent,
invalid, professional.
The dollar came with agressive teeth
to bite territory,
in America's pastoral throat.
It seized Panama with powerful jaws,
sank its fangs into the fresh earth,
wallowed in mud, whisky, blood,
and swore in a President with a frock coat:
"Give us this day our
daily bribe."
Later, steel came,
and the canal segregated residences,
the masters here, the servants there.
They rushed to Nicaragua.
They disembarked, dressed in white,
firing dollars and bullets.
But there a captain rose forth,
saying: "No, here you're not putting
your concessions, your bottle."
They promised him a portrait
of the President, with gloves,
ribbons, and patent leather
shoes, recently acquired.
Sandino took off his boots,
plunged into the quivering swamps,
wore the wet ribbon
of freedom in the jungle,
and bullet by bullet, he answered
the "civilizers."
North American fury
was indescribable: documented
ambassadors convinced
the world that their love was
Nicaragua, sooner or later
order must reach
its sleepy intestines.
Sandino hanged the intruders.
The Wall Street heroes
were devoured by the swamp,
a thunderbolt struck them down,
more than one machete followed them,
a noose awakened them
like a serpent in the night,
and hanging from a tree they were
carried off slowly
by blue beetles
and devouring vines.
Sandino was in the silence,
in the Plaza of the People,
everywhere Sandino,
killing North Americans,
executing invaders.
And when the air corps came,
the offensive of the armed
forces, the incision of
pulverizing powers,
Sandino, with his guerrillas,
was a jungle specter,
a coiled tree
or a sleeping tortoise
or a gliding river.
But tree, tortoise, current
were avenging death,
jungle sysyems,
the spider's mortal symptoms.
(In 1948
a guerrilla
from Greece, Sparta column,
was the urn of light attacked
by the dollar's mercenaries.
From the mountains he fired
on the octupi from Chicago
and, like Sandino, the stalwart man
from Nicaragua, he was named
"the mountain bandit.")
But when fire, blood,
and dollar didn't destroy
Sandino's proud tower,
the Wall Street guerrillas
made peace, invited
the guerrilla to celebrate,
and a newly hired traitor
shot him with his rifle.
His name is Somoza. To this day
he's ruling in Nicaragua:
the thirty dollars grew
and multiplied in his belly.
This is the story of Sandino,
captain from Nicaragua,
heartbreaking incarnation
of our sand betrayed,
divided and assailed,
martyred and sacked.
-------------------------------------------------
Anaconda Mining Co.
(Poem from Pablo Neruda's Canto General)
Name of a coiled snake,
insatiable gullet, green monster,
in the clustered heights,
in my country's rarefied
saddle, beneath the moon
of hardness--excavator--
you open the mineral's
lunar craters, the galleries
of virgin copper, sheathed
in its granite sands.
In Chuquicamata's eternal
night, in the heights,
I've seen the sacrificial fire burn,
the profuse crackling
of the cyclops that devoured the Chileans' hands, weight
and waist, coiling them
beneath its copper vertebrae,
draining their warm blood,
crushing their skeletons
and spitting them out in the
desolate desert wastelands.
Air resounds in the heights
of starry Chuquicamata.
The galleries annihilate
the planet's resistance
with man's little hands,
the gorges' sulphuric bird
trembles, the metal's
iron cold mutinies
with its sullen scars,
and when the horns blast
the earth swallows a procession
of minuscule men who descend
to the crater's mandibles.
They're tiny captains,
my nephews, my children,
and when they pour the ingots
toward the seas, wipe
their brows and return shuddering
to the uttermost chill,
the great serpent eats them up,
reduces them, crushes them,
covers them with malignant spittle,
casts them out to the roads,
murders them with police,
sets them to rot in Pisagua,
imprisons them, spits on them,
buys a trecherous president
who insults and persecutes them,
kills them with hunger on the plains
of the sandy immensity.
And on the infernal slopes
there's cross after twisted cross,
the only kindling scattered
by the tree of mining.
Rakhmetov
19th November 2010, 18:06
Che Guevara by Nicolás Guillén
As if San Martin's pure hand,
Were extended to his brother Martí,
And the plant-banked Plata streamed through the sea,
To join the Cauto's love-swept overture.
Thus, Guevara, strong-voiced gaucho, moved to assure
His guerrilla blood to Fidel
And his broad hand was most comradely
When our night was blackest, most obscure.
Death retreated. Of its shadows impure,
Of the dagger, poison, and of beasts,
Only savage memories endure.
Fused from two, a single soul shines,
As if San Martin's pure hand,
Were extended to his brother Martí.
Columbia (By Langston Hughes)
Columbia
My dear girl,
You really haven't been a virgin for so long.
It's ludicrous to keep up the pretext.
You're terribly involved in world assignations
And everybody knows it.
You've slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you've taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows
In loincloths and cotton trousers.
When they've resisted,
You've yelled, "Rape,"
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Being one of the world's big vampires,
Why don't you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power
Who've long since dropped their
Smoke screens of innocence
To sit frankly on a bed of bombs?
* Columbia (IPA: /kəˈlʌmbiə/ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_English)) is the first popular (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popularity) and poetic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry) name for the United States of America (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States); it is also the origin of the name for the District of Columbia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Washington%2C_D.C.), the federal district (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_district) which is coextensive with the federal capital (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital), Washington. Columbia is a feminine form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender) derived from Christopher Columbus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus), one of the first Europeans to explore the Americas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_colonization_of_the_Americas) after the Vikings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_colonization_of_the_Americas). The moniker dates from before the American Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution) in 1776 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776) but fell out of use in the early 20th century.
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