Song to the Red Army on Its Arrival at the Gates of Prussia by Pablo Neruda

This is the song between night and dawn, this is the song come from the last death rattles as if from the beaten hide of a bloody drum, burst forth from the first joys like the flowering bough in the snow and like the ray of sunlight upon the flowering bough.

These are the words that clutched the dying and that syllable by syllable squeezed the tears like soiled clothes until they dried up the last bitter drops of sobbing and made from all the weeping the hardened braid, the cord, the hard thread that will uphold the dawn.

Brothers, today we can say: daybreak comes, now we can strike the table with the fist that until yesterday upheld our tearful brow.

Now we can look at the crystal tower of our powerful snow-covered range because in the lofty pride of its snowy wings shines the stern splendor of a far-off snow where the invader's claws are buried.

The Red Army at the gates of Prussia. Listen, listen! dark, humbled, radiant heroes of fallen crown, listen! villages destroyed and laid waste and broken, listen! Ukrainian fields where the grain can be reborn with pride.

Listen! martyred ones, hanged ones, listen! dead guerrilla fighters, rigid beneath the frost with hands still clutching the gun, listen! girls, homeless children, listen! sacred ashes of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Peter and Suvorov, listen! on this southern height to the sound that on the gates of Prussia crashes like thunder.

The Red Army at the gates of Prussia. Where are the angered assassins, the gravediggers, where are those who hanged mothers from the fir tree, where are the tigers with a stench of extermination?

They are behind the walls of their own houses trembling, waiting for the lightningstroke of punishment, and when all the walls fall they will see the fir tree and the virgin come, the guerrilla fighter and the child, they will see the dead and the living come to judge them.

Listen, Czechoslovaks, prepare the toughest tongs and the gallows, and the ashes of Lidice so that they may be swallowed tomorrow by the hangman, listen, impatient workers of France, prepare your immortal rivers so that the drowned invaders may navigate them.

Prepare the vengeance, Spaniards, behind the mountain range and close to the coast of the burning south clean the little rusted carbine because the day has come.

This is the song of the dawning day and of the ending night.

Listen to it, and from harsh suffering let the confident voice emerge that does not forgive, and let the punishing arm not tremble.

Before beginning tomorrow the canticles of human pity you still have time to know the lands soaked in martyrdom.

Do not raise tomorrow the flag of pardon over the cursed sons of the wolf and brothers of the serpent, over those who reached the last edge of the knife and demolished the rose.

This is the song of the spring hidden beneath the earth of Russia, beneath the expanse of the taiga and the snow, this is the word that mounts to the throat from the buried root.

From the root covered by so much anguish, from the stalk broken by the bitterest winter on earth, by the winter of blood upon the earth.

But things change, and from the depths of the earth the new spring steps out.

Look at the cannons that flourish in the Prussian mouth.

Look at the machine guns and the tanks that are landing at this hour in Marseilles.

Listen to the stern heart of Yugoslavia throbbing again in the blood-drained breast of Europe.