{"id":96664,"date":"2017-08-21T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-08-21T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=96664"},"modified":"2017-08-07T11:52:59","modified_gmt":"2017-08-07T10:52:59","slug":"im-explaining-a-few-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/08\/im-explaining-a-few-things\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m Explaining a Few Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
\nand the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
\nand the rain repeatedly spattering
\nits words and drilling them full
\nof apertures and birds?
\nI’ll tell you all the news.<\/p>\n

I lived in a suburb,
\na suburb of Madrid, with bells,
\nand clocks, and trees.<\/p>\n

From there you could look out
\nover Castille’s dry face:
\na leather ocean.
\nMy house was called
\nthe house of flowers, because in every cranny
\ngeraniums burst: it was
\na good-looking house
\nwith its dogs and children.
\nRemember, Raul?
\nEh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
\nfrom under the ground
\nmy balconies on which
\nthe light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
\nBrother, my brother!
\nEverything
\nloud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
\npile-ups of palpitating bread,
\nthe stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
\nlike a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
\noil flowed into spoons,
\na deep baying
\nof feet and hands swelled in the streets,
\nmetres, litres, the sharp
\nmeasure of life,
\nstacked-up fish,
\nthe texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
\nthe weather vane falters,
\nthe fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
\nwave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.<\/p>\n

And one morning all that was burning,
\none morning the bonfires
\nleapt out of the earth
\ndevouring human beings —
\nand from then on fire,
\ngunpowder from then on,
\nand from then on blood.
\nBandits with planes and Moors,
\nbandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
\nbandits with black friars spattering blessings
\ncame through the sky to kill children
\nand the blood of children ran through the streets
\nwithout fuss, like children’s blood.<\/p>\n

Jackals that the jackals would despise,
\nstones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
\nvipers that the vipers would abominate!<\/p>\n

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
\nof Spain tower like a tide
\nto drown you in one wave
\nof pride and knives!<\/p>\n

Treacherous
\ngenerals:
\nsee my dead house,
\nlook at broken Spain :
\nfrom every house burning metal flows
\ninstead of flowers,
\nfrom every socket of Spain
\nSpain emerges
\nand from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
\nand from every crime bullets are born
\nwhich will one day find
\nthe bull’s eye of your hearts.<\/p>\n

And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry
\nspeak of dreams and leaves
\nand the great volcanoes of his native land?<\/p>\n

Come and see the blood in the streets.
\nCome and see
\nThe blood in the streets.
\nCome and see the blood
\nIn the streets!<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Pablo Neruda was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Ricardo Eli\u00e9cer Neftal\u00ed Reyes Basoalto. He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. <\/em>Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
\nand the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
\nand the rain repeatedly spattering
\nits words and drilling them full
\nof apertures and birds?
\nI’ll tell you all the news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry-format"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96664\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}