Explore "Cholula" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In Cholula the youths wear their finest cloth, gold, and plumes.
Adorned for the festival, they question the invader.
Death has answered them.
Thousands of corpses lie there.
Murdered hearts laid out, pulsing, opening the moist pit where they tend the trickle of that day.
(They entered killing on horseback, they cut off the hand that offered its tribute of gold and flowers, they closed off the plaza, exhausted their arms until they were numbed, killing the flower of the kingdom, plunging up to their elbows in the blood of my startled brethren.)