Re: poet Pablo Neruda

[provocateur]

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~delacova/sandino/augusto-sandino-1.jpg


From Pablo Neruda's Song of Protest



X

That Friend



Later Sandino crossed the jungle,

he unloaded his sacred gunpowder

against assaulting sailors

grown and paid for in New York:

the earth burned, the foliage resounded:

the Yankee did not expect what was happening:

he dressed very well for war

shining shoes and weapons

but through experience he soon learned

who Sandino and Nicaragua were:

it was a tomb of blond thieves:

air, tree, road, water

Sandino' s guerrillas came forth

even from the whiskey that was opened,

which sickened with quick death

the glorious Louisiana fighters

accustomed to hanging blacks

with superhuman valor:

two thousand hooded men busy

with one black man, a rope and a tree.

Affairs were different here:

Sandino attacked and waited,

Sandino was the coming night,

he was the light from the sea that killed.

Sandino was a tower with flags,

Sandino was a rifle with hopes.

These were very different lessons,

at West Point learning was clean:

they were never taught at school

that he who kills could also die:

the North Americans did not learn

that we love our sad beloved land

and that we will defend the flags

that with pain and love were created.

If they did not learn this in Philadelphia

they found it out through blood in Nicaragua:

the captain of the people waited there:

Augusto C. Sandino he was called.

And in this song his name will remain

full of wonder like a sudden blaze

so that it can give us light and fire

in the continuation of his battles.



XI

Treason

For peace, on a sad night

General Sandino was invited

to dine, to celebrate his courage,

with the "American" Ambassador

(for the name of the whole continent

these pirates have usurped).

General Sandino was joyous:

wine and drinks raised to his health:

the Yankees were returning to their land

desolately defeated

and the banquet sealed with honors

the struggle of Sandino and his brothers.

The assassin waited at the table.

He was a mysterious spineless being

raising his cup time and again

while in his pocket resounded

the thirty horrendous dollars of the crime.

O feast of bloodied wine!

O night, O false moonlit paths!

O pale stars that did not speak!

O land mute and blind by night!

Earth that did not restrain his horse!

O treasonous night that betrayed

the tower of honor into evil hands!

O banquet of silver and agony!

O shadow of premeditated treason!

O pavilion of light that flourised,

since then defeated and mourned!



XII

Death

Sandino stood up not knowing

that his victory had ended

as the Ambassador pointed him out

thus fulfilling his part of the pact:

everything was arranged for the crime

between the assassin and the North American.

And at the door as they embraced him

they bade him farewell condemning him.

Congratulations! And Sandino took his leave

walking with the executioner and death.

[provocateur]

More Sandino

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episo...erviews/ortega/ (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/18/interviews/ortega/)




by Pablo Neruda from his collection of verse Canto General

Sandino

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.

[provocateur]

XIX



To Fidel Castro (by Pablo Neruda, 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 won 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.

[provocateur]

Poem from Pablo Neruda's Canto General

Anaconda Mining Co.

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.

[Danton]

Neruda on Lorca one year after the cowardly and pigheaded murder of one of Spains greatest poets..

"One could not have found in anyone or in anything, to the degree it existed in this man who was chosen, the essence of Spain, it's vitality and it's profundity"