" To Miguel Hernandez in His Infinite Sleep "
Adios, brothers, comrades, friends,
let me take leave of the sun and of the fields!
-- Miguel Hernández
March 28, 1942
Love can’t close your eyes.
Love, this bitter lemon sprinkled with sugar,
this hammer that drives the nails of your songs.
Shepherd from Oriheulo,
you rot away in this Alicante prison,
thoughts crowned with rat dung,
the beloved Republic crushed
under Franco’s fascist jackboots,
while your wife and son eat bread,
suck the white blood of onions to survive.
Love can’t close your eyes.
Good Pablo saw you clearest,
your face like a potato freshly pulled from the earth.
How dark it grew in the sunlight and verdant fields
of your childhood, in the mud of pitch-battle
and the open doors of railcars transporting troops.
Now it’s a mirror reflecting
the shadowy movements of the guards,
all teeth and fists and steel-toed boots,
special treatment reserved
for the Republican “commissar of culture,”
the soldier-poet who inspired from the trenches.
Love can’t close your eyes.
Lorca cautioned don’t be too impatient,
take your time to let everyone
see the generosity of your words & spirit.
What is time to you here
but the push of a broom, piles of dust
growing in dimly lit corridors, stolen glances
of sky and grass, uncaring doctors,
songs refined for weeks
inside your head before secretly
jotting them down on smuggled paper?
Your book grows, folded in the hems
of your wife’s skirt, your friends’ shoe-cushions,
like a tree of defiance raising
its leaves up from the darkness to bear fruit.
Love can’t close your eyes.
Many joke you built this prison
with your poems, board by board, brick by brick,
because they see a heart as large as all of Spain,
a thirst still fighting for their future.
Yesterday, doctors drained a liter and a half
of pus from your tubercular lungs
after your wife’s visit when you scolded her
over your son: “You should have brought him,
you should have brought him.”
Now you slip into delirium, a shepherd again,
ear pressed against a goat udder
listening to milk fill the emptiness,
tasting its warm goodness, frothy with cream,
as the light the dead see floods your cell
with the beauty of leaving this world.
But love can’t close your eyes.
These fingers of love reaching down can’t close your eyes.
© 2004 Jim Doss
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