Explore "Tradition" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In the nights of Spain, through the old gardens, tradition, covered with dead snot, spouting pus, and pestilence, strolled with its tail in the fog, ghostly and fantastic, dressed in asthma and bloody hollow frock coats, and its face with sunken staring eyes was green slugs eating graves, and its toothless mouth each night bit the unborn flower, the secret mineral, and it passed with its crown of green thistles sowing vague deadmen's bones and daggers.
Madrid (1936)
Madrid, alone and solemn, July surprised you with your joy of humble honeycomb: bright was your street, bright was your dream.
A black vomit of generals, a wave of rabid cassocks poured between your knees their swampy waters, their rivers of spittle.
With eyes still wounded by sleep, with guns and stones, Madrid, newly wounded, you defended yourself. You ran through the streets leaving trails of your holy blood, rallying and calling with an oceanic voice, with a face changed forever by the light of blood, like an avenging mountain, like a whistling star of knives.
When into the dark barracks, when into the sacristies of treason your burning sword entered, there was only silence of dawn, there was only your passage of flags, and an honorable drop of blood in your smile.