Residence on Earth

  a bowl with split axles and trampled heads,

  a black bowl, a bowl of Almería blood.

  Each morning, each turbid morning of your lives

  you will have it steaming and burning at your tables:

  you will push it aside a bit with your soft hands

  so as not to see it, not to digest it so many times:

  you will push it aside a bit between the bread and the grapes,

  this bowl of silent blood

  that will be there each morning, each

  morning.

  A bowl for the Colonel and the Colonel’s wife

  at a garrison party, at each party,

  above the oaths and the spittle, with the wine light of early

  morning

  so that you may see it trembling and cold upon the world.

  Yes, a bowl for all of you, richmen here and there,

  monstrous ambassadors, ministers, table companions,

  ladies with cozy tea parties and chairs:

  a bowl shattered, overflowing, dirty with the blood of the poor,

  for each morning, for each week, forever and ever,

  a bowl of Almería blood, facing you, forever.

  OFFENDED LANDS

  Regions submerged

  in interminable martyrdom, through the unending

  silence, pulses

  of bee and exterminated rock,

  you lands that instead of wheat and clover

  bring signs of dried blood and crime:

  abundant Galicia, pure as rain,

  made salty forever by tears:

  Extremadura, on whose august shore

  of sky and aluminum, black as a bullet

  hole, betrayed and wounded and shattered:

  Badajoz without memory, among her dead sons

  she lies watching a sky that remembers:

  Málaga plowed by death

  and pursued among the cliffs

  until the maddened mothers

  beat upon the rock with their newborn sons.

  Furor, flight of mourning

  and death and anger,

  until the tears and grief now gathered,

  until the words and the fainting and the anger

  are only a pile of bones in a road

  and a stone buried by the dust.

  It is so much, so many

  tombs, so much martyrdom, so much

  galloping of beasts in the star!

  Nothing, not even victory

  will erase the terrible hollow of the blood:

  nothing, neither the sea, nor the passage

  of sand and time, nor the geranium flaming

  upon the grave.

  SANJURJO* IN HELL

  Tied up, reeking, roped

  to his betraying airplane, to his betrayals,

  the betrayed betrayer burns.

  Like phosphorus his kidneys burn

  and his sinister betraying soldier’s

  mouth melts in curses,

  piloted through the eternal flames,

  guided and burnt by airplanes,

  burnt from betrayal to betrayal.

  MOLA* IN HELL

  The turbid Mola mule is dragged

  from cliff to eternal cliff

  and as the shipwrecked man goes from wave to wave,

  destroyed by brimstone and horn,

  boiled in lime and gall and deceit,

  already expected in hell,

  the infernal mulatto goes, the Mola mule

  definitively turbid and tender,

  with flames on his tail and his rump.

  GENERAL FRANCO IN HELL

  Evil one, neither fire nor hot vinegar

  in a nest of volcanic witches, nor devouring ice,

  nor the putrid turtle that barking and weeping with the voice of a

  dead woman scratches your belly

  seeking a wedding ring and the toy of a slaughtered child,

  will be for you anything but a dark demolished

  door.

  Indeed.

  From one hell to another, what difference? In the howling

  of your legions, in the holy milk

  of the mothers of Spain, in the milk and the bosoms trampled

  along the roads, there is one more village, one more silence,

  a broken door.

  Here you are. Wretched eyelid, dung

  of sinister sepulchral hens, heavy sputum, figure

  of treason that blood will not erase. Who, who are you,

  oh miserable leaf of salt, oh dog of the earth,

  oh ill-born pallor of shadow?

  The flame retreats without ash,

  the salty thirst of hell, the circles

  of grief turn pale.

  Cursed one, may only humans

  pursue you, within the absolute fire of things may

  you not be consumed, not be lost

  in the scale of time, may you not be pierced by the burning glass

  or the fierce foam.

  Alone, alone, for the tears

  all gathered, for an eternity of dead hands

  and rotted eyes, alone in a cave

  of your hell, eating silent pus and blood

  through a cursed and lonely eternity.

  You do not deserve to sleep

  even though it be with your eyes fastened with pins:

  you have to be

  awake, General, eternally awake

  among the putrefaction of the new mothers,

  machine-gunned in the autumn. All and all the sad children

  cut to pieces,

  rigid, they hang, awaiting in your hell

  that day of cold festivity: your arrival.

  Children blackened by explosions,

  red fragments of brain, corridors filled

  with gentle intestines, they all await you, all in the

  very posture

  of crossing the street, of kicking the ball,

  of swallowing a fruit, of smiling, or being born.

  Smiling. There are smiles

  now demolished by blood

  that wait with scattered exterminated teeth

  and masks of muddled matter, hollow faces

  of perpetual gunpowder, and the nameless

  ghosts, the dark

  hidden ones, those who never left

  their beds of rubble. They all wait for you

  to spend the night. They fill the corridors

  like decayed seaweed.

  They are ours, they were our

  flesh, our health, our

  bustling peace, our ocean

  of air and lungs. Through

  them the dry earth flowered. Now, beyond the earth,

  turned into destroyed

  substance, murdered matter, dead flour,

  they await you in your hell.

  Since acute terror or sorrow waste away,

  neither terror nor sorrow await you. May you be alone

  and accursed,

  alone and awake among all the dead,

  and let blood fall upon you like rain,

  and let a dying river of severed eyes

  slide and flow over you staring at you endlessly.

  SONG ABOUT SOME RUINS

  This that was created and tamed,

  this that was moistened, used, seen,

  lies—poor kerchief—among the waves

  of earth and black brimstone.

  Like bud or breast

  they raise themselves to the sky, like the flower that rises

  from the destroyed bone, so the shapes

  of the world appeared. Oh eyelids,

  oh columns, oh ladders.

  Oh deep substances

  annexed and pure: how long until you are bells!

  how long until you are clocks! Aluminum

  of blue proportions, cement

  stuck to human dreams!

  The dust gathers,

  the gum, the mud, the objects grow

  and the walls rise up


  like arbors of dark human flesh.

  Inside there in white, in copper,

  in fire, in abandonment, the papers grew,

  the abominable weeping, the prescriptions

  taken at night to the drugstore while

  someone with a fever,

  the dry temple of the mind, the door

  that man has built

  never to open it.

  Everything has gone and fallen

  suddenly withered.

  Wounded tools, nocturnal

  cloths, dirty foam, urine just then

  spilt, cheeks, glass, wool,

  camphor, circles of thread and leather, all,

  all through a wheel returned to dust,

  to the disorganized dream of the metals,

  all the perfume, all the fascination,

  all united in nothing, all fallen

  never to be born.

  Celestial thirst, doves

  with a waist of wheat: epochs

  of pollen and branch: see how

  the wood is shattered

  until it reaches mourning: there are no roots

  for man: all scarcely rests

  upon a tremor of rain.

  See how the guitar

  has rotted in the mouth of the fragrant bride:

  see how the words that built so much

  now are extermination: upon the lime and among the shattered

  marble, look

  at the trace—now moss-covered—of the sob.

  THE VICTORY OF THE ARMS OF THE PEOPLE

  But, like earth’s memory, like the stony

  splendor of metal and silence,

  is your victory, people, fatherland, and grain.

  Your riddled banner advances

  like your breast above the scars

  of time and earth.

  THE UNIONS AT THE FRONT

  Where are the miners, where are

  the rope makers, the leather

  curers, those who cast the nets?

  Where are they?

  Where are those who used to sing at the top

  of the building, spitting and swearing

  upon the lofty cement?

  Where are the railroadmen

  dedicated and nocturnal?

  Where is the supplier’s union?

  With a rifle, with a rifle. Among the

  dark throbbing of the plainland,

  looking out over the debris.

  Aiming the bullet at the harsh

  enemy as at the thorns,

  as at the vipers, that’s it.

  By day and by night, in the sad

  ash of dawn, in the virtue

  of the scorched noon.

  TRIUMPH

  Solemn is the triumph of the people.

  At its great victorious passage

  the eyeless potato and the heavenly

  grape glitter in the earth.

  LANDSCAPE AFTER A BATTLE

  Bitten space, troop crushed

  against the grain, broken

  horseshoes, frozen between frost and stones,

  harsh moon.

  Moon of a wounded mare, charred,

  wrapped in exhausted thorns, menacing, sunken

  metal or bone, absence, bitter cloth,

  smoke of gravediggers.

  Behind the acrid halo of saltpeter,

  from substance to substance, from water to water,

  swift as threshed wheat,

  burned and eaten.

  Accidental crust softly soft,

  black ash absent and scattered,

  now only echoing cold, abominable

  materials of rain.

  May my knees keep it hidden

  more than this fugitive territory,

  may my eyelids grasp it until they can name and wound,

  may my blood keep this taste of shadow

  so that there will be no forgetting.

  ANTITANKERS

  Branches all of classic mother-of-pearl, halos

  of sea and sky, wind of laurels

  for you, oaken heroes,

  antitankers.

  You have been in the night mouth

  of war

  the angels of fire, the fearsome ones,

  the pure sons of the earth.

  That’s how you were, planted

  in the fields, dark, like seeds, lying

  waiting. And before the hurricaned iron, at the chest

  of the monster,

  you launched not just a pale bit of explosive

  but your deep steaming heart,

  a lash as destructive and blue as gunpowder.

  You rose up,

  noble, heavenly against the mountains

  of cruelty, naked sons

  of earth and glory.

  Once you saw

  only the olive branch, only the nets

  filled with scales and silver: you gathered

  the instruments, the wood, the iron

  of the harvests and the building:

  in your hands flourished the beautiful

  forest pomegranate or the morning

  onion, and suddenly

  you are here laden with lightning,

  clutching glory, bursting

  with furious powers,

  alone and harsh facing the darkness.

  Liberty sought you out in the mines,

  and begged for peace for your ploughs:

  Liberty rose weeping

  along the roads, shouted in the corridors

  of the houses: in the countryside

  her voice passed between orange and wind

  calling for ripe-hearted men, and you came,

  and here you are, the chosen

  sons of victory, many times fallen, your hands

  many times blotted out, broken the most hidden bones,

  your mouths

  stilled, pounded

  to destruction your silence:

  but you surged up suddenly, in the midst

  of the whirlwind, again, others, all

  your unfathomable, your burning

  race of hearts and roots.

  MADRID (1937)

  At this hour I remember everything and everyone,

  vigorously, sunkenly in

  the regions that—sound and feather—

  striking a little, exist

  beyond the earth, but on the earth. Today a new winter begins.

  There is in that city,

  where lies what I love,

  there is no bread, no light: a cold windowpane falls

  upon dry geraniums. By night black dreams

  opened by howitzers, like bloody oxen:

  no one in the dawn of the ramparts

  but a broken cart: now moss, now silence of ages,

  instead of swallows, on the burned houses,

  drained of blood, empty, their doors open to the sky:

  now the market begins to open its poor emeralds,

  and the oranges, the fish,

  brought each day across the blood,

  offer themselves to the hands of the sister and the widow.

  City of mourning, undermined, wounded,

  broken, beaten, bullet-riddled, covered

  with blood and broken glass, city without night, all

  night and silence and explosions and heroes,

  now a new winter more naked and more alone,

  now without flour, without steps, with your moon

  of soldiers.

  Everything, everyone.

  Poor sun, our lost

  blood, terrible heart

  shaken and mourned. Tears like heavy bullets

  have fallen on your dark earth sounding

  like falling doves, a hand that death

  closes forever, blood of each day

  and each night and each week and each

  month. Without speaking of you, heroes asleep

  and awake, without speaking of you who make the water

  and the earth

  trem
ble with your glorious purpose,

  at this hour I listen to the weather on a street,

  someone speaks to me, winter

  comes again to the hotels

  where I have lived,

  everything is city that I listen to and distance

  surrounded by fire as if by a spume

  of vipers assaulted by a

  water of hell.

  For more than a year now

  the masked ones have been touching your human shore

  and dying at the contact of your electric blood:

  sacks of Moors, sacks of traitors

  have rolled at your feet of stone: neither smoke nor death

  have conquered your burning walls.

  Then,

  what’s happening, then? Yes, they are the exterminators,

  they are the devourers: they spy on you, white city,

  the bishop of turbid scruff, the fecal and feudal

  young masters, the general in whose hand

  jingle thirty coins: against your walls are

  a circle of women, dripping and devout,

  a squadron of putrid ambassadors,

  and a sad vomit of military dogs.

  Praise to you, praise in cloud, in sunray,

  in health, in swords,

  bleeding front whose thread of blood

  echoes on the deeply wounded stones,

  a slipping away of harsh sweetness,

  bright cradle armed with lightning,

  fortress substance, air of blood

  from which bees are born.

  Today you who live, Juan,

  today you who watch, Pedro, who conceive, sleep, eat:

  today in the lightless night on guard without sleep

  and without rest,

  alone on the cement, across the gashed earth,

  from the blackened wire, to the South, in the middle, all around,

  without sky, without mystery,

  men like a collar of cordons defend

  the city surrounded by flames: Madrid hardened

  by an astral blow, by the shock of fire:

  earth and vigil in the deep silence

  of victory: shaken

  like a broken rose, surrounded