HERNANDEZ, Miguel

Because Of Your Feet, Where Your Beauty Ends

Because of your feet, where your beauty ends
in ten fragments of whiteness, more a dance,
a dove ascends to your waist,
an unending balm falls to earth.
Along with your feet goes the wonder
of nacre, in a ridiculous narrowness,
and where your feet go whiteness goes,
a dog sowing anklets of jasmine.
At your feet, as much foam as shore,
sand and sea reach me, and ebb from me,
and I try to enter the sheepfold of your sole.
I enter and let myself pass to your soul itself,
with the loving voice of the grapes:
trample my heart, now it’s ripe.

I have a need for your voice

I have a need for your voice
a longing for your company,

and an ache of melancholy

for the absence of signs of arrival.

Patience requires my torment,

the urgent need for you, heron of love,

your solar mercy for my frozen day,

your help, for my wound, I count on.

Ah, need, ache and longing!

Your kisses of substance, my food,

fail me, and I’m dying with the May.

I want you to come, the flower of your absence,

to calm the brow of thought

that ruins me with its eternal lightning.


Love ascended between us

Love ascended between us

like the moon between two palm-trees

that have never embraced.

The intimate murmur of our two bodies

made the cooing the sea-swell brings,

but the hoarse voice was stifled,

the lips turned to stone.

The yearning to encircle moved our flesh

illuminated our inflamed bones,

but our arms’ desire to reach out

died away in our arms.

Love and the moon passed between us

and devoured our lonely bodies.

And we are two ghosts who search

and find each other from afar.

What Does The Wind Of Bitterness want

What does the wind of bitterness want
that it comes down the gully
and forces the windows
while I dress you in my arms?
To overthrow us, pull us down.
Overthrown, pulled down,
both our bloods receding.
What more does the wind want
more bitterly each moment?

Upon the Dead I Am Sitting

the dead I am sitting
Who have laid still for two months,
Their empty shoes I have kissed
And madly grasped the heart's hand
And the soul sustaining it.

Let my voice rise to the mountains
And on falling earthward thunder,
That is what my throat is craving
Now and always.

Come within my cry, my people,
Who were reared on the same milk,
Tree whose roots imprison me,
For I have come here to love you
And am ready to defend you
With my blood and with my mouth
As if with two faithful rifles.

If from the land I have come
And from a womb I was born
Luckless and poor,
It was only so I'd be
The nightingale of misfortunes,
Echo of adversity,
And to sing and to repeat
To those who should listen to me
All things relating to sorrow,
To the poor, and to the land.

Yesterday the people woke
Naked with nothing to wear,
Hungry with nothing to eat,
And today they have awakened
Justly angry, bleeding justly.
The rifles clutched in their hands
Would be transformed into lions
To finish off all the beasts
That have been beasts for so long.

Though you may not have the arms,
People of ten myriad powers,
Let not your bones be weary,
Punish them that foully strike you
While you still have fists, nails, spit,
Heart, guts and sinews to fight with,
The things of manhood and teeth.
Brave as the wind is brave,
Light as the air is light,
Kill those that kill,
Hate those that hate
The peace of your heart,
The wombs of your women.
Don't turn your backs to them,
Live face to face and die
With chest thrust to the bullets,
Wide as the wall is wide.

I sing in a mournful voice,
Of your heroes, my people:
Of your fears that are my fears,
Your misfortunes that are cast
On the same metal as my cry,
Your sorrows of the same stripes,
And of the same wood
Your thoughts, my brow,
Your heart, my blood,
Your pain, my laurels.
A corridor leading nowhere
Does this life appear to me.

Here while my heart beats I'll live
And here will die when my time comes,
Among the springs of my people,
With my people now and always.
Life consists of many cruel blows,
Death consists of only one.