[XCI]
La edad nos cubre como la llovizna,
Age covers us like drizzle,
interminable y árido es el tiempo,
interminable and arid is time,
una pluma de sal toca tu rostro,
a feather of salt touches your face,
una gotera carcomió mi traje:
a falling drop etched away my suit:
el tiempo no distingue entre mis manos
time does not distinguish my hands from
o un vuelo de naranjas en las tuyas:
a flight of oranges in yours:
pica con nieve y azadón la vida:
life chops weed with snow and with the hoe:
la vida tuya que es la vida mía.
that life of yours that’s my life too.
La vida mía que te di se llena
This life I gave to you fills up
de años, como el volumen de un racimo.
with years, like the massing of a bunch of grapes.
Regresarán las uvas a la tierra.
The grapes will make their way back to the earth.
Y aún allá abajo el tiempo sigue siendo,
And even there below time keeps on being,
esperando, lloviendo sobre el polvo,
waiting, raining down on dust,
ávido de borrar hasta la ausencia.
avid to erase its very absence.
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Cien sonetos de amor
1924, Pablo Neruda y Herederos de Pablo Neruda
1994, Random House Mondadori
Cuarta edición en U.S.A: febrero 2004
[English translation by JMN.]
(c) 2020 JMN
Never Cease Not Forgetting the Alamo
Civilians who take handgun training in Texas shoot at human outlines. The practice fits the tool to its purpose, which is felling humans. The shooter aims for center body mass — a generous sweet spot housing vital organs. Fifty rounds inside number “8” of the concentric circles scores perfect.
As a bombardier trainee in WWII, my dad learned to take apart and assemble a .50-calibre machine gun while blindfolded. “It has 70 pieces,” he wrote home.
In his adolescence he had been shot in the abdomen by a law officer. It was accidental. The officer, a friend, had been demonstrating a quick-draw maneuver to my dad.
In my youth there were a rifle and shotgun in the house, but no handguns. “Too easy to wave around and shoot someone,” my dad decreed.
Living in a pistol-packing culture in 2021 triggered those memories, and a reflection. My country gives each girl and boy their war: granddad WWI; dad WWII; his cousins Korea; my cohort Vietnam; my son, a Navy nurse, the ongoing Bush wars; and so on.
Always shun lapse of recollection of the sacred massacre. What rallies to the cry dressed in flags doesn’t look like civic virtue; more like a cherished grudge stalking a human shape to settle scores with.
(c) 2021 JMN