Explore "The Judges" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In high Peru, in Nicaragua, throughout Patagonia, in the cities, you've had no rights, you've nothing: cup of misery, America's abandoned child, there's no law, no judge to protect your land, your little house with corn.
When your chiefs came, your masters, by now forgotten the ancient dream of talons and knives, the law came to depopulate your sky, to seize your revered fields, to debate the rivers' water, to steal the kingdom of trees.
They testified against you, stamped your shirts, stuffed your heart with leaves and papers, buried you in cold edicts, and when you awakened on the edge of the most precipitous calamity, dispossessed, solitary, vagrant, they gave you jail, bound you, shackled you so that swimming you couldn't escape the water of the poor, so that you'd drown kicking.
The benign judge reads you clause number Four Thousand, Third Paragraph, the same used in the entire blue geography liberated by others like you who fell, and you're instituted by his codicil without appeal, mangy cur.
Your blood asks, how were the wealthy and the law interwoven? With what sulfurous iron fabric? How did the poor keep falling into the tribunals?
How did the land become so bitter for poor children, harshly nourished on stone and grief?
So it was, and so I leave it written.
Their lives wrote it on my brow.