The War (1936) by Pablo Neruda — Read

Spain, shrouded in dreams, awakening like a head of hair with spikes of wheat,

I saw you being born, perhaps amid brambles and darkness, industrious, rising amid oak trees and mountains, traversing the air with open veins.

But I saw you attacked on street corners by the ancient bandoliers. They were masked, with their crosses made of vipers, their feet mired in the glacial swamp of corpses.

Then I saw your body extricated from brushlands, broken on the sand, bloody, opened, without world, spurred in agony.

To this very day water from your crags runs amid dungeons, and you bear your barbed crown in silence, to see who will last longer, your grief or the faces that pass without looking at you.

I lived with your dawn of rifles, and I want people and gunpowder to shake the dishonored branches until the dream trembles and the earth's divided fruits are gathered again.