Neruda and Vallejo: Selected Poems by Robert Bly

Author:Robert Bly
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780807096796
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 1993-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

LETTER TO MIGUEL OTERO SILVA, IN CARACAS

(1948)

Nicolas Guillen brought me your letter, written

invisibly, on his clothes, in his eyes.

How happy you are, Miguel, both of us are!

In a world that festering plaster almost covers

there is no one left aimlessly happy but us.

I see the crow go by ; there’s nothing he can do to harm me.

You watch the scorpion, and polish your guitar.

Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch

a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed,

and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie,

you in the Venezuela you inherited gather together

whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands

around the live coal of life.

What happiness, Miguel!

Are you going to ask where I am? I’ll tell you—

giving only details useful to the State—

that on this coast scattered with wild rocks

the sea and the fields come together, the waves and the pines,

petrels and eagles, meadows and foam.

Have you ever spent a whole day close to sea birds,

watching how they fly? They seem

to be carrying the letters of the world to their destinations.

The pelicans go by like ships of the wind,

other birds go by like arrows, carrying

messages from dead kings, viceroys,

buried with strands of turquoise on the Andean coasts,

and seagulls, so magnificently white,

they are constantly forgetting what their messages are.

Life is like the sky, Miguel, when we put

loving and fighting in it, words that are bread and wine,

words they have not been able to degrade even now,

because we walk out in the street with poems and guns.

They don’t know what to do with us, Miguel.

What can they do but kill us ; and even that

wouldn’t be a good bargain—nothing they can do

but rent a room across the street, and tail us

so they can learn to laugh and cry like us.

When I was writing my love poems, which sprouted out from me

on all sides, and I was dying of depression,

nomadic, abandoned, gnawing on the alphabet,

they said to me: “What a great man you are, Theocritus!”

I am not Theocritus: I took life,

and I faced her and kissed her,

and then went through the tunnels of the mines

to see how other men live.

And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness,

I held my hands up and showed them to the generals,

and said: “I am not a part of this crime.”

They started to cough, showed disgust, left off saying hello,

gave up calling me Theocritus, and ended by insulting me

and assigning the entire police force to arrest me

because I didn’t continue to be occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects.

But I had brought joy over to my side.

From then on I started getting up to read the letters

the sea birds bring from so far away,

letters that arrive moist, messages I translate

phrase by phrase, slowly and confidently: I am punctilious

as an engineer in this strange duty.

All at once I go to the window. It is a square

of pure light, there is a clear horizon

of grasses and crags, and I go on working here

among the things I love: waves, rocks, wasps,

with an oceanic and drunken happiness.

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