Of Stones

I've put together all the stones

that have come down on me.

I've raised a staircase high

and climbed it to the heights.

I've woven a flowered tapestry

and lost myself in dream.

A road,

a bed,

a house,

a mate.

All of stone.

Between stones

my verses rose and grew.

My life…

Breaking stones

and planting flowers.

Among stones that were crushing me

I've lifted up the rough-hewn stone

of my own poetry.

▲▲▲

These Hands

Look at these hands

of a woman who works the earth,

rugged hands made to dig.

Heavy, short-fingered,

uncared for, unloved.

Bony and coarse.

Hands that have never worn gloves.

No gleaming rings for them.

My thin wedding band.

One day the stirring heroic call:

I gave my gold for Sao Paulo.

Hands that have swept and cooked.

Have washed and hung

wet clothing on the line.

Scrimped and patched.

Domestic heavy patchwork hands.

Intimate with getting by,

with the rice and beans

of their house.

With the big old copper kettle.

The earthenware pot.

Sticks of firewood.

Ashes from the woodstove.

Hands that filled with ash and lye the basket

for making soap.

My confectionary hands…

Never idle.

Fertile. Immense and always busy.

Hard working hands.

Open always to give,

to help, to join together and to bless.

Hands of a sower…

Accustomed to the seeding of hard work.

My hands, roots

seeking out the earth.

Always sowing.

Never for them the

joys of harvest.

Tenacious hands, obtuse,

battered from removing stones, from falling down,

from chiseling at life 's edges.

Hands like levers

excavating unfinished constructions.

The small short hands of a woman

who never found anything in life.

Wayfarer on a long road.

Always walking.

Solitary, searching for

the promised angle,

I, the rejected stone.

▲▲▲

Pablo Neruda (III)

Poet. When you went off forever

the bells of the earth tolled

and all the sirens screamed

to warn the universe.

It snapped, your golden thread

of universal poetry.

On what remote star

has that utter poet's head of yours

settled now to rest?

Great singer of the Americas,

renowned tamer of that wild

horse of whom you sing.

Unsubdued by halter or by reins

with which they try to curb

your primal disobedience.

Great poet.

Your freezing body molecule

by molecule disintegrates

in the cold earth of Temuco,

and gathers shape again

in the great and universal all.

And I can see you in the ether

ruling over all the wild

horses of the earth.

▲▲▲

Cora Coraline, Who Are You?

I am a woman like any other.

I come from the last century

and carry with me all the ages.

I was born in a hollow in the mountains

with hills and ridges all around.

"The middle of nowhere."

In a town from which they took

the gold and left the rocks.

Next to which my childhood

and adolescence ran their course.

The wild cliffs gave answer to

my yearnings.

And I, enclosed within those

endless mountain ranges

that turn to blue in far off

distances.

In my yearning for life I took flight

on the impossible wings

of dreams.

I come from the last century.

I belong to a generation

bridging the liberation

of the slaves and the freed laborer.

The fallen

monarchy and the republic

that rose up.

All the rancidness of the past was

present.

The brutality, lack of understanding,

            ignorance, rigidity.

Corporal punishment.

At home. At school.

In the quarters and in the fields.

A child didn't have a chance,

adults were sadists

and imposed humiliating punishments.

There was an old school teacher who had

already taught the generation

before my own.

Teaching methods were

old-fashioned and I learned my letters

from outdated books which

no one even mentions any more.

Numbers never entered

my understanding.

Maybe due to the poverty that would mark

my life forever.

I needed little from numbers.

Being more a domestic than

an intellectual,

I never wrote in a conscious

and a reasoned manner, but rather

driven by an uncontrollable force.

Being like that gives me

a sense of authenticity.

I was born to write, but the environment,

the times, those around me and other factors

gave my life a counter brand.

I am more a pastry maker and a cook

than a writer, and cooking

is the noblest of the arts:

objective, concrete, never abstracted

from what is tied to life and

the health of human beings.

There was no literary stimulation from the family.

There was always, in the family, if not

hostility, at least a definite reserve

towards this innate tendency of mine.

Maybe, due to all this and more,

I feel within me, in the depths of my

secret reservoirs, a vague desire to be

                                                    illiterate.

I survived, reconstructing myself bit

by bit, from under the harsh views, the

rigid prejudices of the past.

Prejudices of class.

Prejudices of color and of family.

Economic prejudices.

Iron-bound social prejudices.

The school of life filled in

deficiencies of elementary school

for fate had given me no other.

That's how I made it to this book

with nothing special worth mentioning.

No first prize.

No second place.

No honorable mention.

No crown of laurels.

Just the authenticity of my

words torn bit by bit

from the depths of my sensibility,

and this yearning:

I try each day to get beyond

my own reconstructed

personality,

shattering within me

all that's old and dead.

Struggle, the vibrant word

that raises up the weak

and makes the strong determined.

Who will feel the life

within these pages…

Generations that will come from

generations not yet born.

(All translations into English by Alexis Levitin)