Explore "Toussaint L'Ouverture" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Out of its own tangled sweetness
Haiti raises mournful petals, and elaborate gardens, magnificent structures, and rocks the sea as a dark grandfather rocks his ancient dignity of skin and space.
Toussaint L'Ouverture knits together the vegetable kingdom, the majesty chained, the monotonous voice of the drums and attacks, cuts off retreats, rises, orders, expels, defies like a natural monarch, until he falls into the shadowy net and they carry him over the seas, dragged along and trampled down like the return of his race, thrown into the secret death of the ship holds and the cellars.
But on the island the boulders burn, the hidden branches speak, hopes are passed on, the walls of the fortress rise.
Liberty is your own forest, dark brother, don't lose the memory of your sufferings, may the ancestral heroes have your magic sea foam in their keeping.