Let the rail splitter awake

“And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted
unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell...
MATTHEW 11:23.

Wes of the Colorado river is a place I love.
I turn toward it, with everything that lives in me,
with all that I was, and am, and believe.

There are tall red rocks, made structures

by the savage air with its thousand hands,

and the scarlet sky arose from the abyss

into them, becoming copper, fire and strength.
America, stretched like a buffalo hide,

aerial, clear night of gallop,

there, toward the starred summits

I drink your cup of green dew. _

Yes, through acrid Arizona and knotty Wisconsin,
to Milwaukee upraised against wind and snow,
in the hot swamps of West Palm,
near the pine groves of Tacoma, in the dense
steel aroma of your woods, ,

I walked upon mother earth,

blue leaves, stones beneath waterfalls,
hurricanes trembling like music,

rivers in prayer like nionasteries,

wild geese and apples, land and water,
infinite stillness wherein the wheat is born.

:

There, from within my central rock of being
I could extend my eyes, ears, hands on the air
until I.heard books, engines, snow, struggles,
factories, graves, plants, footsteps,

and from Manhattan the moon on a ship,

the song of the weaving machine,

the iron spoon that devours earth,

the drill that strikes like a condor

and. al] that oppresses, cuts, sews, runs:
people and wheels in continuous motion and birth.

_ IT love the farmer’s small home. New mothers |
_ asleep, fragrant as tamarind syrup: freshly ironed
Laas : i : cloth:
fires burning in a thousand homes
surrounded by onion fields.
(The men when they sing down near the river
have voices rough as the stones on its bottom:
tobacco arose from its wide leaves
and like a fiery goblin entered these homes.)
Come into Missouri, look at its cheese and grain,
at the fragrant boards red as violins,
the man navigating a barley-field,
the newly-broken, blue-black colt
that scents bread and alfalfa:
bells, poppies, blacksmiths’ forges,
_and in the jumble of sylvan cinemas
love bares its teeth. ae
in a dream born of earth.

It is your peace that we love, not your mask.
Your warrior’s face is not handsome.
You are vast and beautiful, North America.
Your origin is humble like a washerwoman’s,
white. beside your rivers.
Shaped in the unknown, : :
it is your peace of honeycomb that is most sweet.
_ We love your man whose hands are red
_ from the clay of Oregon, your Negro son
_ who brought you his music born
in the ivory zones, we love
your city, your substance,
your light, your machinery, the energy
of the West, the tranquil honey
of apiary and small town,
the husky boy riding a tractor,
the oat-fields you inherited
from Jefferson, the roaring wheel
that measures out your oceanic territory,
factory smoke and the kiss number a thousand
of a new seitlement:
your industrious blood is what we love:
your worker's hand grimed with oil.

‘

Under the prairie night, since long ago,
resting on a buffalo hide in grave silence

are the syllables, the song

of what I was before being, of what we were.
Melville is a marine yew-tree, from his branches
springs a curve of prow, an arm .

of wood and ship. Whitman endless

-as the fields of grain, Poe in his mathematical
twilight, Dreiser, Wolfe,

fresh wounds in our own absence,

Lockridge, recently dead, bound to the depths,

how many others, bound to the shadows,

while above them burns the same hemispheric
: dawn
and of them is made what we are.

Powerful infants, blind captains,

and actions and foliage at times terrifying,
interrupted by joy and pain,

beneath prairies traversed by traffic,

how many dead on plains never before visited:
tormented innocents, prophets newly published,
upon the buffalo skins of the prairies.

From France, from Okinawa, from the atolls
of Leyte (Norman Mailer has recorded it),
from the furious air and waves, almost all
the young soldiers have returned.
Alniost all..... Green and bitter was their story
of mpd and sweat: too rarely did they hear
the song of coral reefs, perhaps they never touched
except to die in the islands, the brilliant fragrant
flowers:

blood and dung.
pursued. them, filth and rats,

_and a weary, desolate, fighting heart. ‘

But now they have come back, you have received
them
in your open, far-reaching land.
and they have closed up (those who returned)
like a corolla of innumerable, anonymous petals,
to be reborn, and to forget.

2

ee they found a guest in the house,
or they brought new eyes (or were blind before)
or rasping branches tore their eyelids ‘
or there are new things in the American land.
Those Negroes who fought with you, hard and
5 smiling,
look: ‘
men have placed a flaming cross
in their part of town, |

‘they have hanged and burned your brother in

blood:
today they
deny him
voice and decision; at night the hooded
executioners gather, with whip and cross.

By PABLO NERUDA

they made him a man of combat,

coe

“Almost all... Green and bitter was their story
of mud and sweat: too rarely did they hear
the song of coral reefs, perhaps they never touched
sure to die in the islands, the brilliant fragrant
lowers, ‘.

N these pages the Pacific Tribune is

proud to present what is perhaps the
greatest poetic work of our times—an in-
spiring call to the peoples of North America
to fight for peace. The author, Pablo
Neruda, is a Communist senator of Chile
and Latin America’s best-loved poet. Ousted
from the Chilean Senate even before his
party was banned, Neruda has now been
forced into hiding by those who defile de-
mocracy by seeking to silence his voice.

(It was another story
overseas, in battle.)
An unexpected guest
like an old gnawed octopus,

,

immense . and

; encircling,
has installed himself in your house, my soldier

: friend.
The press exudes the ancient venom, distilled in
uf Berlin:
magazines (Time, Newsweek, etc.) are raucous
yellow sheets of defamation; Hearst,
who sang a love song to the Nazis, smiles
and sharpens his claws so that you may go out
again
toward the reefs or the steppes ee
to fight for that guest within your house.
They give you no respite: they want to keep on
selling
steel and bullets, they prepafe more gunpowder
which must be sold quickly, before fresh weapons
advance grasped by new hands. *

Everywhere the bosses now settled

in your mansion enlarge their falanges,

they love Franco Spain and offer you a cup of

: blood:

the Marshall
cocktail.

(one executed, one hundred);
te

Choose young blood: farmers
in China, prisoners

in Spain,

blood and sweat, in the sugar-fields of Cuba,
tears of the women

in the coal and copper mines of Chile;

next, beat it with energy,

‘like blows with a truncheon,

and don’t forget the ice cubes and some drops

from the song “Let us defend Christian culture.”

Is this a bitter mixture?

You will grow used to it, soldier friend, and
\sesean drink it.

At whatever place in the world, in moonlight

or in the morning, in the luxury hotel,

_ ask for this drink that strengthens and refreshes

and pay for it with a good bill bearing the image
bs of Washington.
You have also discovered that Charles Chaplin,
last father of tenderness in the world,
-is defamed and that the writers (Howard Fast
; : Pack and others)
the scientists and the artists, .
of your country
must submit to being judged for “Un-American”
thoughts
before a tribunal of merchants enriched by the war.
To the remotest corner of the world fear has come.
My aunt reads this news and is frightened,
all the eyes on earth watch
these courts of shame and vengeance.
This is the justice of blood-stained Babbitts,

. of the slaveholders, the assassins of Lincoln,

it is the new Inquisition which now arises

not for the cross (even that was horrible, in-_
! 4 ; explicable),

but for the round gold which rings

on the tables of whorehouses and banks

and which has no right to judge.

Morinigo, Trojillo, Gonzalez Videla,
Somoza, Dutra, joined forces in Bogota, and
: applauded.

You, young American, do not know them, they are
the somber vampires of our skies, bitter
is the shadow of their wings: |

prisons,
martyrdom, death, hatred: the southern countries _
with their petroleum and nitrate :
have conceived monsters.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — NOVEMBER 19, 1948 — PAGE: 10