Residence on Earth

  spring of misfortune,

  grainlands still

  unopened, secret storehouses

  of blue and tin, ovaries, doors, closed

  arches, depths

  that tried to give birth, all was guarded

  by triangular guards with guns,

  by sad-rat-colored priests,

  by lackeys of the huge-rumped king.

  Tough Spain, land of apple orchards and pines,

  your idle lords ordered you:

  Do not sow the land, do not give birth to mines,

  do not breed cows, but contemplate

  the tombs, visit each year

  the monument of Columbus the sailor, neigh

  speeches with monkeys come from America,

  equal in “social position” and in putrefaction.

  Do not build schools, do not break open earth’s

  crust with plows, do not fill the granaries

  with abundance of wheat: pray, beasts, pray,

  for a god with a rump as huge as the king’s rump

  awaits you: “There you will have soup, my brethren.”

  TRADITION

  In the nights of Spain, through the old gardens,

  tradition, covered with dead snot,

  spouting pus and pestilence, strolled

  with its tail in the fog, ghostly and fantastic,

  dressed in asthma and bloody hollow frock coats,

  and its face with sunken staring eyes

  was green slugs eating graves,

  and its toothless mouth each night bit

  the unborn flower, the secret mineral,

  and it passed with its crown of green thistles

  sowing vague deadmen’s bones and daggers.

  MADRID (1936)

  Madrid, alone and solemn, July surprised you with your joy

  of humble honeycomb:

  bright was your street, bright was your dream.

  A black vomit

  of generals, a wave

  of rabid cassocks

  poured between your knees

  their swampy waters, their rivers of spittle.

  With eyes still wounded by sleep,

  with guns and stones, Madrid, newly wounded,

  you defended yourself. You ran

  through the streets

  leaving trails of your holy blood,

  rallying and calling with an oceanic voice,

  with a face changed forever

  by the light of blood, like an avenging

  mountain, like a whistling

  star of knives.

  When into the dark barracks, when into the sacristies

  of treason your burning sword entered,

  there was only silence of dawn, there was

  only your passage of flags,

  and an honorable drop of blood in your smile.

  I EXPLAIN A FEW THINGS

  You will ask: And where are the lilacs?

  And the metaphysical blanket of poppies?

  And the rain that often struck

  your words filling them

  with holes and birds?

  I am going to tell you all that is happening to me.

  I lived in a quarter

  of Madrid, with bells,

  with clocks, with trees.

  From there one could see

  the lean face of Spain

  like an ocean of leather.

  My house was called

  the house of flowers, because it was bursting

  everywhere with geraniums: it was

  a fine house

  with dogs and children.

  Raúl, do you remember?

  Do you remember, Rafael?

  Federico,* do you remember

  under the ground,

  do you remember my house with balconies where

  June light smothered flowers in your mouth?

  Brother, brother!

  Everything

  was great shouting, salty goods,

  heaps of throbbing bread,

  markets of my Argüelles quarter with its statue

  like a pale inkwell among the haddock:

  the olive oil reached the ladles,

  a deep throbbing

  of feet and hands filled the streets,

  meters, liters, sharp

  essence of life,

  fish piled up,

  pattern of roofs with cold sun on which

  the vane grows weary,

  frenzied fine ivory of the potatoes,

  tomatoes stretching to the sea.

  And one morning all was aflame

  and one morning the fires

  came out of the earth

  devouring people,

  and from then on fire,

  gunpowder from then on,

  and from then on blood.

  Bandits with airplanes and with Moors,

  bandits with rings and duchesses,

  bandits with black-robed friars blessing

  came through the air to kill children,

  and through the streets the blood of the children

  ran simply, like children’s blood.

  Jackals that the jackal would spurn,

  stones that the dry thistle would bite spitting,

  vipers that vipers would abhor!

  Facing you I have seen the blood

  of Spain rise up

  to drown you in a single wave

  of pride and knives!

  Treacherous

  generals:

  look at my dead house,

  look at broken Spain:

  but from each dead house comes burning metal

  instead of flowers,

  but from each hollow of Spain

  Spain comes forth,

  but from each dead child comes a gun with eyes,

  but from each crime are born bullets

  that will one day seek out in you

  where the heart lies.

  You will ask: why does your poetry

  not speak to us of sleep, of the leaves,

  of the great volcanoes of your native land?

  Come and see the blood in the streets,

  come and see

  the blood in the streets,

  come and see the blood

  in the streets!

  SONG FOR THE MOTHERS OF SLAIN MILITIAMEN

  They have not died! They are in the midst

  of the gunpowder,

  standing, like burning wicks.

  Their pure shadows have gathered

  in the copper-colored meadowland

  like a curtain of armored wind,

  like a barricade the color of fury,

  like the invisible heart of heaven itself.

  Mothers! They are standing in the wheat,

  tall as the depth of noon,

  dominating the great plains!

  They are a black-voiced bell stroke

  that across the bodies murdered by steel

  is ringing out victory.

  Sisters like the fallen

  dust, shattered

  hearts,

  have faith in your dead.

  They are not only roots

  beneath the bloodstained stones,

  not only do their poor demolished bones

  definitively till the soil,

  but their mouths still bite dry powder

  and attack like iron oceans, and still

  their upraised fists deny death.

  Because from so many bodies an invisible life

  rises up. Mothers, banners, sons!

  A single body as alive as life:

  a face of broken eyes keeps vigil in the darkness

  with a sword filled with earthly hopes!

  Put aside

  your mantles of mourning, join all

  your tears until you make them metal:

  for there we strike by day and by night,

  there we kick by day and by night,

  there we spit by day and by night

  until the doors of
hatred fall!

  I do not forget your misfortunes, I know

  your sons,

  and if I am proud of their deaths,

  I am also proud of their lives.

  Their laughter

  flashed in the silent workshops,

  their steps in the subway

  sounded at my side each day, and next

  to the oranges from the Levant, to the nets from the South, next

  to the ink from the printing presses, over the cement

  of the architecture

  I have seen their hearts flame with fire and energy.

  And just as in your hearts, mothers,

  there is in my heart so much mourning and so much death

  that it is like a forest

  drenched by the blood that killed their smiles,

  and into it enter the rabid mists of vigilance with the

  rending loneliness of the days.

  But

  more than curses for the thirsty hyenas, the bestial

  death rattle,

  that howls from Africa its filthy privileges,

  more than anger, more than scorn, more than weeping,

  mothers pierced by anguish and death,

  look at the heart of the noble day that is born,

  and know that your dead ones smile from the earth

  raising their fists above the wheat.

  WHAT SPAIN WAS LIKE

  Spain was tense and lean, a daily

  drum of opaque sound,

  plainland and eagle’s nest, silence

  of scourged inclemency.

  How, even to weeping, even to the soul,

  I love your hard earth, your humble bread,

  your humble people, how even to the deep seat

  of my existence there is the lost flower of your wrinkled

  villages, motionless in time,

  and your mineral countrysides

  extended in moon and age

  and devoured by an empty god.

  All your structures, your animal

  isolation next to your intelligence

  surrounded by the abstract stones of silence,

  your bitter wine, your smooth

  wine, your violent

  and delicate vineyards.

  Ancestral stone, pure among the regions

  of the world, Spain crossed

  by bloods and metals, blue and victorious

  proletarian of petals and bullets, uniquely

  alive and somnolent and resounding.

  Huélamo, Carrascosa,*

  Alpedrete, Buitrago,

  Palencia, Arganda, Galve,

  Galapagar, Villalba.

  Peñarrubia, Cedrillas,

  Alcocer, Tamurejo,

  Aguadulce, Pedrera,

  Fuente Palmera, Colmenar, Sepúlveda.

  Carcabuey, Fuencaliente,

  Linares, Solana del Pino,

  Carcelén, Alatox,

  Mahora, Valdeganda.

  Yeste, Riopar, Segorbe,

  Orihuela, Montalbo,

  Alcaraz, Caravaca,

  Almendralejo, Castejón de Monegros.

  Palma del Rio, Peralta,

  Granadella, Quintana

  de la Serena, Atienza, Barahona,

  Navalmoral, Oropesa.

  Alborea, Monóvar,

  Almansa, San Benito,

  Moratalla, Montesa,

  Torre Baja, Aldemuz.

  Cevico Navero, Cevico de la Torre,

  Albalate de las Nogueras,

  Jabaloyas, Teruel,

  Camporrobles, la Alberca.

  Pozo Amargo, Candeleda,

  Pedroñeras, Campillo de Altobuey,

  Loranca de Tajuña, Puebla de la Mujer Muerta,

  Torre la Cárcel, Játiva, Alcoy.

  Pueblo de Obando, Villar del Rey,

  Beloraga, Brihuega,

  Cerina, Villacañas, Palomas,

  Navalcán, Henarejos, Albatana.

  Torredonjimeno, Trasparga,

  Agramón, Crevillente,

  Poveda de la Sierra, Pedernoso,

  Alcolea de Cinca, Matallanos.

  Ventosa del Rao, Alba de Tormes,

  Horcajo Medianero, Piedrahita,

  Minglanilla, Navamorcuende, Navalperal,

  Navalcarnero, Navalmorales, Jorquera.

  Argora, Torremocha, Argecilla,

  Ojos Negros, Salvacañete, Uriel,

  Laguna Seca, Cañamares, Salorino,

  Aldea Quemada, Pesquera de Duero.

  Fuenteovejuna, Alpedrete,

  Torrejón, Benaguacil,

  Valverde de Júcar, Vallanca,

  Hiendelaencina, Robledo de Chavela.

  Miñogalindo, Ossa de Montiel,

  Méntrida, Valdepeñas, Titaguas,

  Almodóvar, Gestalgar, Valdemoro,

  Almoradiel, Orgaz.

  ARRIVAL IN MADRID OF THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE

  One morning in a cold month,

  an agonizing month, stained by mud and smoke,

  a month without knees, a sad month of siege and misfortune,

  when through the wet windows of my house

  the African jackals could be heard

  howling with rifles and teeth covered with blood, then,

  when we had no more hope than a dream of powder,

  when we already thought

  that the world was filled only with devouring monsters

  and furies,

  then, breaking the frost of the cold Madrid month,

  in the fog

  of the dawn

  I saw with these eyes that I have, with this heart

  that looks,

  I saw arrive the clear, the masterful fighters

  of the thin and hard and mellow and ardent stone brigade.

  It was the anguished time when women

  wore absence like a frightful coal,

  and Spanish death, more acrid and sharper than other deaths,

  filled fields up to then honored by wheat.

  Through the streets the broken blood of man joined

  the water that emerges from the ruined hearts of homes:

  the bones of the shattered children, the heartrending

  black-clad silence of the mothers, the eyes

  forever shut of the defenseless,

  were like sadness and loss, were like a spit-upon garden,

  were faith and flower forever murdered.

  Comrades,

  then

  I saw you,

  and my eyes are even now filled with pride

  because through the misty morning I saw you reach

  the pure brow of Castile

  silent and firm

  like bells before dawn,

  filled with solemnity and blue-eyed, come from far,

  far away,

  come from your corners, from your lost fatherlands,

  from your dreams,

  covered with burning gentleness and guns

  to defend the Spanish city in which besieged liberty

  could fall and die bitten by the beasts.

  Brothers, from now on

  let your pureness and your strength, your solemn story

  be known by children and by men, by women and by old men,

  let it reach all men without hope, let it go down to the mines

  corroded by sulphuric air,

  let it mount the inhuman stairways of the slave, let all the stars,

  let all the flowers of Castile

  and of the world

  write your name and your bitter struggle

  and your victory strong and earthen as a red oak.

  Because you have revived with your sacrifice

  lost faith, absent heart, trust in the earth,

  and through your abundance, through your nobility, through

  your dead,

  as if through a valley of harsh bloody rocks,

  flows an immense river with doves of steel and of hope.

  BATTLE OF THE JARAMA RIVER*

  Between t
he earth and the drowned platinum

  of olive orchards and Spanish dead,

  Jarama, pure dagger, you have resisted

  the wave of the cruel.

  There, from Madrid, came men

  with hearts made golden by gunpowder,

  like a loaf of ashes and resistance,

  there they came.

  Jarama, you were between iron and smoke

  like a branch of fallen crystal,

  like a long line of medals

  for the victorious.

  Neither caverns of burning substance,

  nor angry explosive flights,

  nor artillery of turbid darkness

  controlled your waters.

  The bloodthirsty drank

  your waters, face up they drank water:

  Spanish water and olive fields

  filled them with oblivion.

  For a second of water and time the river bed

  of the blood of Moors and traitors

  throbbed in your light like the fish

  of a bitter fountain.

  The bitter wheat of your people was

  all bristling with metal and bones,

  formidable and germinal like the noble

  land that they defended.

  Jarama, to speak of your regions

  of splendor and dominion, my mouth is not

  adequate, and my hand is pale:

  there rest your dead.

  There rest your mournful sky,

  your flinty peace, your starry stream,

  and the eternal eyes of your people

  watch over your shores.

  ALMERÍA*

  A bowl for the bishop, a crushed and bitter bowl,

  a bowl with remnants of iron, with ashes, with tears,

  a sunken bowl, with sobs and fallen walls,

  a bowl for the bishop, a bowl of Almería

  blood.

  A bowl for the banker, a bowl with cheeks

  of children from the happy South, a bowl

  with explosions, with wild waters and ruins and fright,