By Pablo Neruda
Death kept dispatching and reaping
its tribute in sites and tombs:
man with dagger or with pocket,
at noon or in the nocturnal light,
hoped to kill, kept killing,
kept burying beings and branches,
murdering and devouring corpses.
He prepared his nets, wrung dry,
bled white, departed in the morning
smelling blood from the hunt,
and upon returning from the triumph he was shrouded
by fragments of death and abandonment,
and killing himself, he then buried
his tracks with sepulchral ceremony.
The homes of the living were dead.
Slag, broken roofs, urinals,
wormy alleyways, hovels
awash with human tears.
“You must live like this,” said the decree.
“Rot in your substance,” said the Foreman.
“You’re filthy,” reasoned the Church.
“Sleep in the mud,” they told you.
And some of them armed the ash
to govern and decide,
while the flower of mankind beat
against the walls built for them.
The Cemetery possessed pomp and stone.
Silence for all the stature
of lofty tapered vegetation.
At last you’re here, at least you leave
us a hollow in the heart of the bitter jungle,
at last you lie stiff between walls
that you won’t breach. And every day
the flowers, like a river of perfume,
joined the river of the dead.
The flowers untouched by life
fell on the hollow that you left.
