Come up, brother, and be born with me.
Give me your hand from the deepest
Reaches of your disseminated pain.
You won’t be returning from the depths of the rock
You won’t be returning from subterranean time
Your hardened voice will not be coming back
Your dilled out eyes will not be coming back
Look up at me from the bottom of the earth,
Silenced weaver, laborer, shepherd:
Tender of the guardian guanacos:
Mason of the death- defying walkway:
Water-carrier of the Andes`tears:
Jeweler of the crushed fingers:
Farmer trembling inside the seed:
Potter pored out into your clay:
Bring to the cup of this new life
All your old buried sufferings.
Show me your blood and your furrowed face,
Talk to me: here’s the place where I was punished
Because the gem didn’t shine or the earth
Didn’t deliver the stone or the grain on time.
Point out to me the rocks where you fell
And the timber where you were crucified,
Strike the fire of the ancient flint,
Light the old lamps in me, the lashing whips
Leaving their scars in your flesh across centuries
And the gleaming axes stained with the blood.
I come to speak trough your death mouth.
Bring together across the earth
The lips spilled into silence
And out of the depths speak to me all night long
As if we were shackled together,
Tell me everything, chain by chain,
Link by link and step by step,
Sharpen the knives you kept,
Put them in my chest and in my hand,
Like a river of yellow lightning,
Like a river of buried tigers,
And let my tears flow, hours, days, years,
Through sightless ages, starry centuries.
Give me your silence, water, hope.
Give me your struggle, iron, volcanoes.
Fasten your bodies to mine like magnets.
Enter my veins and my mouth.
Speak through my words and my blood.
Labels: Alturas, Machu Picchu, Neruda, Sube a Nacer
