Explore "Tupac Amaru (1781)" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Condorcanqui Tupac Amaru, wise man, just forefather, you saw the desolate springtime of the Andean scaffolds climb up to Tungasuca with salt and calamity, iniquities and torments.
Noble Inca, great Chief, everything was stored in your eyes as in a coffer burned to dust by love and sadness.
The Indian showed you his back on which the new bites shone over the healed scars of former punishments, and it was back after back, all the highlands shaken by cascading sobs.
It was sob after sob.
Until you prepared the clay- colored people's march, gathered the tears in your cup, and hardened the trails.
The father of the mountains came, the gunpowder opened roads, and the father of combat came to the humiliated peoples.
They threw their ponchos into the dust, the old knives united, and the conch shell called the scattered bonds.
Against the cruel stone, against calamitous inertia, against the metal of the chains.
But they divided your people and sent brother against brother, until the stones of your fortress fell.
They bound your weary members to four raging horses and quartered the light of the implacable dawn.
Tupac Amaru, vanquished sun, a vanished light rises from your sundered glory like the sun over the sea.
The deep tribes of clay, the sacrificed looms, the wet sand houses say in silence: "Tupac," and Tupac is a seed, they say in silence: "Tupac," and Tupac is preserved in the furrow, they say in silence: "Tupac," and Tupac germinates in the ground.