to XII from The Heights of Macchu Picchu
Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses.
You will not emerge from subterraime.
Your rasping voice will not e back,
nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
tiller of fields, weaver, retit shepherd,
groom of totemic guanacos,
mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,
i of Aears,
jeweler with crushed fingers,
farmer anxious among his seedlings,
potter wasted among his clays--
bring to the cup of this new life
your a buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow;
say to me: here I was sced
because a gem was dull or because the earth
failed to give up in time its tithe of or stone.
Point out to me the ro which you stumbled,
the wood they used to crucify your body.
Strike the old flints
to kindle a lamps, light up the whips
glued to your wounds throughout the turies
and light the axes gleaming with your blood.
I e to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips gregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.
And tell me everything, tell by ,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar turies.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me the struggle, the iron, the voloes.
Let bodies g like mago my body.
e quickly to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.
Pablo Neruda