Ode To Federico Garcia Lorca- by Pablo Neruda If I could weep with fear in a lonely house, if I could pluck out my eyes and eat them, Id do it for your mourning orangetree voice and for your poetry that flies up shouting. For they paint the hospitals blue for you, and the schools and maritime districts grow, and the wounded angels are covered with feathers, and the nuptial fish are covered with scales, and the hedgehogs go flying to heaven: for you the tailorshops with their black membranes fill with spoons and with blood, swallow torn ribbons, kill themselves with kisses, and dress in white. When you fly dressed in peach, when you laugh with a laugh of hurricane rice, when you flap your arteries and teeth to sing, your throat and your fingers, I could die for the sweetness you are, I could die for the crimsom lakes where you live in the midst of Autumn with a fallen charger and a bloodied god, I could die for the graveyards that pass at night like ashen rivers, with water and graves, between muffled bells: rivers dense as dormitories of sick soldiers, that suddenly swell towards death in rivers with marble numbers and rotten garlands, and funeral oils: I could die from seeing you at night watching the drowned crosses pass, afoot and weeping, because you weep before the river of death, abandoned and wounded, you weep weeping, your eyes filled with tears, with tears, with tears. At night, desperately alone, if I could gather forgetfullness, shadow and smoke above railroads and steamships, with a black funnel, chewing the ashes, Id do it for the tree in which you grow, for the nests of golden waters you unite, and for the net that covers your bones telling you the secret of the night. Cities with damp onion fragrance wait for you to pass singing hoarsely, and silent boats of sperm pursue uyou, and green swallows nest in your hair, and snails and weeks too, furled masts and cherrytrees circle definitively when your pale head with fifty eyes and your mouth of submerged blood appear. If I could fill the mayors posts with soot and throw down watches, sobbing, it would be to watch: when at your house summer arrives with broken lips, a crowd arrives in death-watch clothes, regions of sad splendor arrive, dead plows and poppies arrive, gravediggers and horsemen arrive, planets and maps of blood arrive, divers covered with ash arrive, masqueraders dragging virgins pierced with large knives arrive, hospitals, ants, roots, springs and veins arrive, the night arrives with the bed on which a lonely Hussar dies among the spiders, a rose of hatred and pins arrives, a yellowed embarkation arrives, a windy day with a child arrives, I arrive with Oliverio and Norah, Vicente Aleixandre, Delia, Maruca, Malva Marina, María Luisa y Larco, la Rubia, Rafael, Ugarte, Cotapos, Rafael Alberti, Carlos, Bebé, Manolo Altolaguirre, Molinari, Rosales, Concha Méndez, and others Ive forgotten. Come to what crowns you, youth of health, gay butterfly, youth pure as a black lightning perpetually free; and talking between ourselves. now, when no one is left among the rocks, let us speak simply, as you are, as I am: what are the verses for, if not for the dew? What are the verses for, if not for this night in which a bitter dagger finds us out, for this day, for this twilight, for this broken corner where the beaten heart of man prepares to die? Over everything at night, at night there are many stars, all within a river like a ribbon beside the windows of houses filled with poor people. Someone they know has died, maybe theyve lost their jobs in the offices, in the hospitals, in the elevators, in the mines; they endure their purpose stubbornly, wounded, and theres purpose and weeping everywhere: while the stars flow on in an endless river there is much weeping in the windows, the thresholds are worn by the weeping, the bedrooms are soaked by the weeping that comes in the shape of a wave to corrode the carpets. Federico, you see the world, the streets, the vinegar, the farewells in the stations where the smoke lifts its decisiive wheels toward where there is nothing but some separations, stones, iron tracks. There are so many people asking questions everywhere. Theres the bloodied blind man, and the angry man, the discouraged man, the miserable man, the tree of fingernails, the thief with envy riding his back. Lifes like this, Federico; here you have the things my friendship can offer you, from a melancholy manly man. Already youve learned many things by yourself, and slowly you will be learning more.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Jun 2014 14:28:35 +0000
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