Pablo Neruda Heights of Macchu Picchu XII

Rise up and be born with me, brother. From the deepest reaches of your disseminated sorrow, give me your hand. You will not return from the depths of rock. You will not return from subterranean time. It will not return, your hardened voice. They will not return, your drilled-out eyes. Look at me from the depths of the earth, plowman, weaver, silent shepherd: tender of the guardian guanacos: mason of the impossible scaffold: water-bearer of Andean tears: goldsmith of crushed fingers: farmer trembling on the seed: potter poured out into your clay: bring all your old buried sorrows to the cup of this new life. Show me your blood and your furrow, say to me: here I was punished because the gem didnt shine or the earth didnt deliver the stone or the grain on time: point out to me the rock on which you fell and the wood on which they crucified you, burn the ancient flints bright for me, the ancient lamps, the lashing whips stuck for centuries to your wounds and the axes brilliant with bloodstain. I come to speak through your dead mouth. Through the earth unite all the silent and split lips and from the depths speak to me all night long as if we were anchored together, tell me everything, chain by chain, link by link and step by step, sharpen the knives you kept,

place them in my chest and in my hand, like a river of yellow lightning, like a river of buried jaguars, and let me weep, hours, days, years, blind ages, stellar centuries. Give me silence, water, hope. Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes. Fasten your bodies to mine like magnets. Come to my veins and my mouth. Speak through my words and my blood. Translated and Mark Eisner (John Felstiner, Stephen Kessler) 2004, from City Lights' The Essential Neruda