Listen: Tribute to Pablo Neruda
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MER Special presenting a tribute to poet Pablo Neruda. Program contains various readings and commentary of Neruda’s work performed by Robert Bly and others.

"Ode to My Socks" by Pablo Neruda (translation by Robert Bly) / American Center of the P.E.N. Club Address on Chile's Debt Renegotiation by Pablo Neruda / "Body of a Woman" by Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly) / "The Light Wraps You" by Pablo Neruda (translation by Robert Bly) / "Let the Rail Splitter Awake" by Pablo Neruda (translation by Robert Bly)

Transcripts

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[MUSIC PLAYING] [NON ENGLISH SPEECH]

SPEAKER 1: I never understood how far Chile was away from us until I heard that reading because I've heard some Spanish read from time to time. But that is so far South. That is very difficult.

Well, here is my notion. This is a translation of Ode to My Socks. And this is done by Robert Bly, who will be reading here later. And one of the great things I think is this.

One of the things I really loved about Neruda was that he could be on the run and take time to write a poem about somebody who's given him a pair of socks. I think that's a great kind of fugitive. Anyway, here's the poem in translation.

Maru Mori brought me

a pair

of socks

which she knitted herself

with her sheepherder's hands,

two socks as soft

As rabbits.

I slipped my feet

into them

as though into

two

cases

knitted

with threads of

twilight

and goatskin.

Violent socks,

my feet were

Two fish made

of wool,

two long sharks

sea-blue, shot

through

by one golden thread,

two immense blackbirds,

two cannons--

my feet

were honored

in this way

by

these

heavenly socks.

they were

so handsome

for the first time

my feet seemed to me

unacceptable

Like two decrepit

Firemen, firemen

unworthy

of that woven

Fire,

of those glowing

socks.

Nevertheless

I resisted

the sharp temptation

to save them somewhere

as schoolboys

keep fireflies,

as learned men

collect

sacred texts,

I resisted

the mad impulse

to put them

into a golden

cage

And each day give them

birdseed

and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers

in the jungle who hand

over the very rare

green deer

to the spit

and eat it

With remorse,

I stretched out

my feet

and pulled on

the Magnificent

socks

and then my shoes.

The moral

of my ode is this--

beauty is twice

beauty

and what is good is doubly

good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool

in winter.

[APPLAUSE]

That strikes me as a report from somebody who's been barefoot.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Now, here is something much later. This is a speech that Neruda gave when he was still ambassador to France and still alive at the 50th anniversary celebration of the American Center of the PEN.

PEN is-- I don't know what the devil it stands for, but it has something to do with it's an international writers organization, as you might imagine from the letters. And Neruda spoke to this group. And this is what he had to say.

In the course of my roving life, I have attended quite a number of strange meetings. Only a few days ago, however, I was present at what seems to me to be the most mysterious of all the meetings in which I have ever taken part.

I was seated there with a handful of my fellow countrymen in front of us in what looked like a vast circle, to my eyes, set the representatives of banks and treasuries and high finance, the delegates of numerous countries to which so it would seem my country owes a very great deal of money.

We the Chileans were few in numbers and our eminent creditors, almost entirely from major countries, were very many, perhaps 50 or 60 of them. The business in hand was the renegotiation of our public debt, of our external debt, build up in the course of half a century by former governments.

In this same half century, men have reached the moon, complete with penicillin and television. In the field of warfare, Napalm has been invented to render democratic by means of its purifying fire the ashes of a number of inhabitants of our planet.

During these same 50 years, this American Center of the PEN club has worked nobly for the cause of reason and understanding. But as I could see at that relentless, meeting, Chile was nevertheless under the menace of an updated version of the garrotte. Namely the standby.

In spite of half a century of intellectual understanding, the relations between rich and poor, between nations which lend some crumbs of comfort and others which go hungry, continue to be a complex mixture of anguish and pride, injustice, and the right to live.

For my part, I, who am now nearing 70, discovered Walt Whitman when I was just 15. And I hold him to be my greatest creditor. I stand before you feeling that I bear with me always this great and wonderful debt, which has helped me to exist.

To renegotiate this debt, I must start by recognizing its existence. And acknowledging myself to be the humble servant of a poet who strode the earth with long, slow paces, pausing everywhere to love, to examine, to learn, to teach, and to admire.

The fact of the matter is that this great man, this lyric moralist, chose a hard path for himself. He was both a torrential and a didactic singer, qualities which appear opposed seemingly also more appropriate to a leader than to a writer.

But what really counts is that Walt Whitman was not afraid to teach, which means to learn at the hands of life and undertake the responsibility of passing on the lesson. To speak frankly, he had no fear of either moralizing or immoralizing, nor did he seek to separate the fields of pure and impure poetry.

He was the first totalitarian poet. His intention was not just to sing, but to impose on others his own total and wide ranging vision of the relationship of men and nations. In this sense, his patent nationalism forms part of a total and organic universal vision.

He held himself to be the debtor of happiness and sorrow alike, and also of both the advanced cultures and the more primitive societies. There are many kinds of greatness. But let me say, though, I be a poet of the Spanish tongue, that Walt Whitman has taught me more than Spain's Cervantes.

In Walt Whitman's work, one never finds the ignorant being humbled, nor is the human condition ever found offended. We continue to live in a Whitman's age, seeing how new men and new societies rise and grow despite their birth pangs.

The Bard complained of the all powerful influence of Europe, from which the literature of his age continued to draw sustenance. In truth, he Walt Whitman, was the protagonist of a truly geographical personality. The first man in history to speak with a truly continental American voice, to bear a truly American name.

The colonies of the most brilliant countries have left a legacy of centuries of silence. Colonialism seems to slay fertility and stultify the power of creation. One has only to look at the Spanish empire, where I can assure you that three centuries of Spanish Dominion produced not more than two or three writers worthy of praise in all America.

The proliferation of our republics gave birth to more than merely flags and nationalities, universities, small heroic armies, or melancholy love songs. Books started to proliferate as well, yet they too often formed an impenetrable thicket, bearing many a flower but little fruit.

With time, however, and especially in our own days, the Spanish language has at last started to shine out in the works of American writers who, from Rio Grande to Patagonia, have filled a whole dark continent, struggling toward a new independence with magical stories and with poems now tender, now desperate.

In this age, we see now other new nations, other new literatures, and new flags. How they are coming into being with what one hopes is the total extinction of colonialism in Africa and Asia.

Almost overnight, the capitals of the world are seen studded with the banners of peoples we had never heard of, seeking self-expression with the unpolished and pain laden voice of birth.

Black writers of both Africa and America begin to give us the true pulse of the luckless races which have hitherto been silent. Political battles have always been inseparable from poetry. Man's liberation may often require bloodshed, but it always requires song. And the song of mankind grows richer day by day in this age of suffering and liberation.

I ask your pardon humbly in advance for going back to the subject of my country's troubles. As all the world knows, Chile is in the process of carrying out a revolutionary transformation of its social structure with true dignity and within the strict framework of our legal Constitution.

This is something which annoys and offends many people. Why on earth? They ask. Don't these pesky Chileans imprison everyone, close down newspapers, or shoot any citizen who contradicts them?

As a nation, we chose our path for ourselves. And for that very reason, we are resolved to pursue it to the real end. But secret opponents use every kind of weapon to turn aside-- to turn our destiny aside.

As cannon seemed to have gone out of fashion in this kind of war, they use a whole arsenal of arms, both old and new. Dollars and darts, telephone and telegraph services. Each seems to serve.

It looks as though anything at all will do when it comes to defending ancient and unreasonable privileges. That is why when I was sitting in that meeting in which Chile's external debt was being renegotiated in Paris, I could not help thinking of the Ancient Mariner.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge drew upon an episode, which took place in the extreme south of my country for the basis of his desolate poem. In Chile's cold seas, we have every kind and species of albatross. Wandering, gigantic gray and stormy and supremely splendid in flight.

That is perhaps the reason why my country has the shape of a great albatross with wings outspread. And in that unforgettable meeting in which we were striving to renegotiate our external debt in a just fashion, many of those who appeared so implacable seemed to be taking aim in order to bring Chile tumbling down so that the albatross should fly no more.

To mention this may be the indiscretion of a poet who has only been an ambassador for a year. But it looked to me as though it was perhaps the representative of the United States finance who concealed an arrow under his business papers, ready to aim it at the albatross heart. Nevertheless, this financier had a pleasant name. One which could sound well at a banquet's end. He is called Mr. Hennessy.

And if he would take the trouble to reread the poets of former times, he might learn from the Ancient Mariner that the sailor who perpetuated such a crime or perpetrated such a crime was doomed to carry the heavy corpse of the slain albatross hanging from his neck through all eternity. And I hope to Christ, that he does.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 2: I'll begin with telling how I came to know anything of him. I got through college without hearing his name. And then I found that being a Norwegian, anyway, the English were not really my meat, neither Alan Tate nor John Donne. And I was inured to eating crickets or something the rest of my life.

I went to Norway and in the library in Norway, I found what I hadn't found in the United states, which was a translation of Neruda. And I was astounded the first line that I saw of his was something like this.

Young girls with their hands on their hearts, dreaming of Pirates. Wonderful thing. He keeps on like this, taking these images on like done and the rest who taken the image and they lay it out very carefully. Then they prepare for the next one and fold the tail in. Neruda doesn't do this.

He takes images like this one, and it's sort of like coming to the edge of a cliff and leaping off. And then he gets another image and he leaps off with that one and the third one and the fourth one.

So it looks extremely dangerous when you start to do it because there's nothing in the poem but one image after the other. And yet you have to understand that it takes fantastic faith in the integrity of the human psyche in order to do that, to know that you're not going to fall down, but that the psyche will provide another and then it will provide another.

And that when the whole poem is over, if you've been honest to your inner feelings, that the whole thing will be a unity and will say something too. It's that faith which is so astounding. And the second thing that struck me about it was that here is a man who isn't like Eliot sneering at women.

He says young girls with their hands in their hearts dreaming of Pirates. There's no indication that the girls ought to be dreaming of something else. There's no suggestion that they were wrong in any way.

And so I started to read more of him. Then it was probably because of that, that I decided to start a magazine when I got back to try to bring in Nude and Veliko and others. Then I was living in New York with my wife one time, and I was in the subway train and I met a fellow hanging on a strap, and he turned out to be a translator from the UN, from Chile.

And I said, wow, do you know Pablo Neruda? He says, no. But I have a friend who knows him, is a doctor. And I said, terrific. And so he said, we'll come up and see you some night. I'll bring the doctor along. I said, great.

So the doctor came up one night, is the doctor from Chile, who was 22 or 23 here for a thing. So he said, this is a man who knows. I said, have you seen Pablo Neruda? Yeah, I saw him. I said, where was he? He was in a restaurant in Santiago.

And he was sitting at a table next to me with two women. And I said, did you hear anything he said? Were you sitting near enough so you could hear anything he said? And he said, yeah, I did. And I said, what did he say? He said, more butter, more lobsters, more wine.

He began as a love mad poet. He was about 15 or 16. He started to write poems. His father was a railway worker who fell off a train and was killed. He said, my father is buried in one of the rainiest cemeteries in the world.

Then in his autobiography, he tells an incredible story. He went to his father's grave maybe 10 years later, and they were built up in a stone thing like this, as they are in Louisiana. And he was going to move the casket. So they pulled a casket out like this and suddenly out of the casket came pouring gallons and gallons of water.

And he stood and looked at it, absolutely stunned. And he finally he realized, of course, the water had risen and it filled the casket. But somehow it was an event right out of his own poetry in which a death carries with it this fantastic water, fantastic substance, fantastic joy. Do you understand that? Would never happen to Auden. It would only happen to Neruda.

[LAUGHTER]

And then when he was still a student, he wrote this book called Twenty Poems of Love and One Ode of Desperation. Fantastic book. Still loved all over. When we did his first reading in New York and 66, some South Americans were there and they said, you would have never gotten through that reading in South America.

We said, why not? Because when it was halfway through, everyone would have started clapping. Veinte poemas. Veinte poemas. They want the 20 poems of love. And they clap until he stopped and started to read some. That's the way we treat them. So I'll read you a few of these. It's called Twenty Poems of Love and One Ode of Desperation. I've just translated the first 10. so this is the way he begins.

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,

When you surrender, you stretch out like the world.

My body, savage, and peasant, undermines you

and makes a son leap in the bottom of the earth.

I was lonely as a tunnel. Birds flew for me.

And night invaded me with a powerful army.

To survive I forged you like a weapon,

like an arrow for my bow, like a stone for my sling.

But now the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.

Body of skin, of moss, of firm and thirsty milk!

I love the cups of your breasts! And your eyes full of absence!

And the roses of your secret mound! And your voice low and sad!

Body of my woman, I will live on through your marvelousness.

My thirst, my desire without end, my wavering road!

Dark riverbeds down which the eternal thirst is flowing,

And the fatigue is flowing, and the grief without shore.

[APPLAUSE]

All of the time the primary tone in him was his tremendous sadness and melancholy. Later he'll mention it. You'll see it mentioned in his other poems. And when you saw him, every line in his face turned down, every line pointed toward the earth.

And when you heard him read, the first time I heard him read, it was amazing. It wasn't a masculine poet and all of this. It was an old woman weeping on the steps of some cathedral. Did you feel that grief in his voice? It was there when he was 20 years old. Tremendous grief, tremendous compassion. But it turned up in him also as melancholy. Well, here's the second one.

The light all around you with its fires about to die,

Pale and suffering absence

Standing there in front of the old spirals

of the dust that move in circles around you.

Silent, my darling,

alone in the solitude of this hour that the dead love.

A fruit drops from the sun into your dark dress.

The big night roots climb up suddenly out of your soul,

And what lives in your darkness comes to the surface

so that a village that is pale and blue and just born

Feeds and gets life through you.

Magnificent and abundant and magnetic slave of the circle

That moves through Black and gold.

Standing she attempts and she achieves a creation

so living that her flowers lose life.

And there is so much sadness.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 3: Well, I understand the wide expression of Neruda. I mean, from the amorous erotic to the social. And I think this is a very important thing in relation to Neruda, in relation to any poet from the erotic and the personal to the social.

But I really resent in some ways the element of merely the erotic in relation to Neruda. I think Neruda was one of the great poets of the Americas in relation to the people's struggles. This doesn't say that you shouldn't be happy in bed. I mean, I don't think you can be happy in bed except with the social struggle.

[APPLAUSE]

And I think this is our problem in the North America in understanding the great thing of Neruda who made this great from the personal to the social to the struggle of the people, to the struggle of himself in this.

And I think one of the great poems, which has been really put down in America is Let the Railsplitter Awake. And I really demand that I want to read that poem tonight, Let The Railsplitter Awake, because it's related to our country and it was written can you imagine it before it was published in 51.

It was written after the Second World war, but it's one of the most beautiful expressions of Neruda in relation to the people of the Americas, of all the Americas. And this in '49 or '48 when he wrote this. Now it is particularly-- I mean now it is really expressing itself in a great image of the Americas.

And this goes from Chile to Wounded Knee. Yesterday they buried Pedro Bissonette in Wounded Knee. And this is certainly related to Allende and Neruda, who I'm sure would grieve for Pedro and understand his relationship not only in bed, but in the social struggle.

I don't see why these should be separated. I don't know how many of you know this poem of I'm going to have to cut it tonight, but it's one of the great poems of the relationship of what I call the Americas, which means South and Middle and North America. And we are going to be related, whether we like it or not. West of the Colorado River is a place I love.

I turn towards it and everything that lives in me with all that I was and am believe. There are tall red rocks made of structures by the savage air with its 1,000 hands and the scarlet sky arose from the abyss into them to become copper, fire, and strength.

America stretched like a buffalo hide, aerial clear night of gallop there towards this starred summits. I drink your cup of green dew. I like to present this to our young people who have a feeling that our America is not so beautiful or so important or is depraved.

Yes, through acrid Arizona and naughty Wisconsin to Milwaukee, upraised against wind and snow in the hot swamps of West. near the pine groves of Tacoma in the dense and steel aroma of your woods, I walked upon mother earth.

Blue leaves, stones beneath waterfalls, hurricanes trembling like music. Rivers in prayer, like monasteries, wild geese, and apples, land, and water. Infinite stillness wherein the wheat is born.

They're 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 and all that strikes like a condor and all that oppresses, cuts, sews, runs, people and wheels in continual motion and birth.

I love the farmer's small home. And new mother's asleep and the fragrant as tamarind syrup and the freshly ironed cloth. Fires burning in a thousand homes surrounded by onion field.

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 into cheese and grain into at the fragrant boards red as violins.

The man giving navigating a barley field, the newly broken blue black colt that sense bread and alfalfa, bales, poppies. Blacksmiths forges. And in the jumble of Sylvan cinemas, love bares its teeth and a dream born of earth.

It is your place peace that we love, not your mask. Your warrior's face is not handsome. Your vast and beautiful North America. Your origin is humble like a washerwoman's white beside your rivers shaped in the unknown.

It is your place 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 into music born into 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 your new settlement. 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 and arm of wood and ship.

Whitman endless as the fields of grain from France, from Okinawa, from the Atolls, from Lethe, from all this blood and dung pursued them filth and rats and a weary, desolate, fighting heart.

An unexpected story. 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 Berlin magazines time, Newsweek week.

A raucous yellow sheets of defamation. Hearst, we sing a love song to the Nazis. Smile and sharpens his claws so that you may go out again towards the reefs or the steppes to fight for that guest within your house.

These chords of shame and vengeance. This is the justice of bloodstained Babbits of the slaveholders. The assassins of Lincoln of the new inquisition, which now arises not for the cross, even that was horrible and inexplicable.

But for the round gold which rings on the tables of whorehouses and banks and which has no right to judge. [NON-ENGLISH] joined forces in Bogota.

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.

In Chile, in the night, the hangman's order arrives at the humble, damp house of the miner. The children awake, crying. Thousands are in jail, are thinking in Paraguay the deep forest shade hides the bones of a murdered Patriot.

A shot sounds in the phosphorescence of summer. Truth died there in Santo Domingo. Why didn't Mr. Vandenburg, Mr. Armor, Mr. Marshall, Mr. Hirst intervened to defend the West.

Tormented, aroused in the night. Why was the president of Nicaragua driven to flight to death in exile? Bananas must be defended. They're not liberties. And Somoza will suffice for this. These great victorious ideas penetrate Greece and China to aid governments stained like dirty carpets. A soldier.

I also go beyond your lands, America. There I make my wandering home flying, traveling, singing, and conversing throughout the days. And in Asia, in the USSR, in the Urals, I pause and expand. My soul permeated with solitude and resin.

I love whatever man has created in space to blow of struggle and love. My house in the Urals is still surrounded by the ancient night of pines and silence like a tall beehive.

Here, wheat and steel were born from the hand of man from his breast like a blue phenomenon. Walk firmly. Open your ear to the vast human world. It is not the elegant gentleman of the State Department, nor the ferocious steel barons who are speaking to you.

But a poet from the extreme South of America. Son of a railroad worker from Patagonia. America as the Indian heir. Today a fugitive from a country wherein prison, torture, and anguish rule.

While copper and oil gradually transform into gold for the foreign lords, you are not the idol who carries gold in one hand and his other, the bomb. You are what I am, what I was.

But we must protect the fraternal subsoil soil of pure America. The simple men of streets and roadways. My brother Juan sells shoes just like your brother John. My sister Juana peels potatoes just like your cousin Jane. And my blood is of miners and sailors like your blood.

You and I will open doors so that the Euro air will blow through the curtains of ink. You and I will tell the infuriated my dear fellow just far and no further for beyond the land belongs to us and no whistle or machine gun will be heard there, but a song, and another and a song.

But if you arm your hosts North America to destroy this pure border and send the Chicago slaughterer to govern the music in order which we love, we will emerge from stones and air to bite you.

You will emerge from the last window to fire upon you. We will emerge from the deepest waves to stab you with thorns. We will emerge from the furrows so that the seed can smash like a Colombian fist. We will emerge to deny you bread and water. We will emerge to bury you in hell.

Don't set foot in gentle France then, soldier. We will be there to see that the green vines shall give vinegar and the poor girl shall point out to you the spot where German blood is still flesh.

Don't dare demand man flesh from lofty Peru. In the ragged midst of ruins, our blood gentle ancestors sharpened their amethyst swords against you in the valleys. Sound the hoarse conch shells of battle, calling together warriors with their slings.

The sons of [? Amoura ?] nor along the Mexican sierras need you search for men to bring them into combat against the dawn for the rifles of Zapata are not sleeping. They are oils and aimed at the Texas plains.

Do not enter Cuba where in the ocean glare and the sweaty sugarcane fields one single dark glance awaits you and a single cry until it dies or kills. Do not advance to the partisan lands in [INAUDIBLE] Italy. Don't pass beyond the rows of soldiers that you maintain in Rome.

Don't go past Saint Peter's. Beyond that, the rustic village saints, the marine and fishing saints love the great country of steps where the world flowered anew. Do not approach the bridge of Bulgaria.

They won't let you pass the rivers of Romania. We shall throw boiling blood to scrawl the invaders. Do not hail the farmer who now knows the tomb of his feudal lords, who with his plow and rifle stands guard.

Do not look at him, for he will burn you like a star. Do not embark in China. In other words, there were ditches filled with water, then an endless barbed wire with prongs and claws.

But this ditch is wider, these waters deeper and even farther on radiant and resolute. Steely, smiling. Ready for song or comeback there await you. Men and women of the tundra and the Taiga warriors of the Volga who vanquished death.

Children who vanquished death in Stalingrad. Children who giant of the Ukraine's. All one vast high wall of stone and blood, iron and song, courage and hope. And the smiles from Rochester will turn into shadows that will scatter over the air of the steppes to be buried forever in snow.

And they will make of your medals as small, cold bullets to whistle ceaselessly across the entire tremendous land that today is joyous. And the vine covered laboratory will also release the unchained atom toward your proud cities. Let none of this happen.

[APPLAUSE]

Let none of this happen. Let the railsplitter awake. Let Abe come with his ax and his wooden plate to eat with the farmers. Let his head like tree bark. His eyes like those in wooden planks, in Oak tree bowls, turn to look on the world, rising above the foliage higher than the sequoias.

Let him buy something in a drugstore. Let him take a bus to Tampa. Let him bite into a yellow apple and enter a movie house to converse with all the simple people. Let the railsplitter awake. Let Abe come. Let his aged yeast raise the green and gold Earth of Illinois.

Let him lift his ax in his own town against the new slaveholders, against the slave lash, against the poison printing press, against the bloodied merchandise they want to sell. Let them march singing and smiling.

The young White, the young Black against the walls of gold, against the manufacturer of hate, against the merchant of their blood. Let them sing, laugh, and conquer. Let the railsplitter awake. Peace for the twilights to come.

Peace for the bridge. Peace for the wine. Peace for the stanzas which pursue me and in my blood uprise, entangling my earliest songs with earth and love's. Peace for the city in the morning when bread wakes up. Peace for the Mississippi source of rivers.

Peace for my brother's shirt. Peace for books like a seal of air. Peace for the ashes of those dead and those other dead. Peace for the grimy iron of Brooklyn. Peace for the letter carrier from house to house goes like the day.

Peace for the choreographer who shouts through a funnel to the honeysuckle vine. Peace for my own right hand that wants to write only Rosario. Peace for the Bolivian secretive as a lump of tin.

Peace so that you may marry. Peace for all the sawmills of Biobio. Peace for the torn heart of guerrilla Spain. Peace for the little museum in Wyoming where the most lovely thing is a pillow embroidered with a heart.

Peace for the baker and his loaves. And peace for the flower. Peace for all the wheat to be born. For all the love which will seek its [INAUDIBLE] shelter. And peace for all those alive. Peace for all lands and all waters.

Here I say farewell. I return to my house in my dreams. I return to Patagonia, where the wind rattles the vines and the ocean spatters ice. I am nothing more than a poet. I love all of you.

I wonder about the world I love. In my country, they drill miners, and soldiers give orders to judges. But I love even the roots in my small, cold country. If I had to die 1,000 times over, it is there, I would die.

If I had to be born 1,000 times over, it is there I would be born near the tall white wild pines, the tempestuous South wind, the newly purchased bells. Let none think of me. Let us think of the entire Earth and pound the table with love.

I don't want blood again to saturate bread beams music. I wish they would come with me. The miner, the little girl, the lawyer, the sea man, the doll maker. To go into a movie and to come out. To drink the reddest wine. I do not come to solve anything. I came here to sing. And for you to sing with me.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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