Election in Chimborongo (1947) by Pablo Neruda

In Chimborongo, Chile, long ago

I went to a senatorial election.

I saw how the pillars of society were elected.

At eleven in the morning oxcarts crammed with sharecroppers arrived from the country.

It was winter. Wet, dirty, hungry, barefoot, the serfs from Chimborongo climb down from the oxcarts.

Grim, sunburnt, tattered, they're packed together, led ballots in hand, marshaled in a bunch to draw their pay and, herded like horses, they're led back to the oxcarts again.

Then they're thrown meat and wine until they're left brutally debauched and forgotten.

Later I heard the speech of the senator thus elected:

"We, Christian patriots, we, defenders of the order, we, children of the spirit."

And his belly trembled, his voice of a besotted cow that seemed to sway like a mammoth's trunk in the sinister caverns of howling prehistory.