THE LIBERATORS
Here comes the tree, the tree
of the storm, the tree of the people.
Its heroes rise up from the earth
as leaves from the sap,
and the wind spangles the whispering
multitudes foliage,
until the seed falls
again from the bread to the earth.
Here comes the tree, the tree
nourished by naked corpses,
corpses scourged and wounded,
corpses with impossible faces,
impaled on spears,
reduced to dust in the bonfire,
decapitated by ax,
quartered by horse,
crucified in church.
Here comes the tree, the tree
whose roots are alive,
it fed on martyrdom’s nitrate,
its roots consumed blood,
and it extracted tears from the soil:
raised them through its branches,
dispersed them in its architecture.
They were
invisible flowers—
sometimes, buried flowers,
other times they illuminated
its petals, like planets.
And in the branches mankind harvested
the hard corollas,
passed them from hand to hand
like magnolias or pomegranates,
and suddenly, they opened the earth,
grew up to the stars.
This is the tree of the emancipated.
The earth tree, the cloud tree,
the bread tree, the arrow tree,
the fist tree, the fire tree.
The stormy water of our nocturnal
epoch floods it,
but its mast balances
the arena of its might.
At times, the branches broken
by wrath fall again,
and a foreboding ash
covers its ancient majesty:
just as it survived in times past,
so too it rose from agony
until a secret hand,
countless arms, the people,
preserved the fragments,
hid invariable trunks,
and their lips were the leaves
of the immense divided tree,
disseminated everywhere,
walking with its roots.
This is the tree, the tree
of the people, of all the peoples
struggling for freedom.
Look at its hair:
touch its renewed rays:
plunge your hands into the factories
where its pulsing fruit
propagates its light each day.
Raise this earth in your hands,
partake of this splendor,
take your bread and your apple,
your heart and your horse
and mount guard on the frontier,
at the limits of its leaves.
Defend the destiny of its corollas,
share the hostile nights,
guard the cycle of the dawn,
breathe in the starry
heights,
sustaining the tree, the tree
that grows in the middle of the earth.
From the Canto General
by Pablo Neruda
Translated by Jack Schmitt