Hoy desde aquí (poemas)

(Poems and texts with accompaniment)

The people
(Pablo Neruda)

I remember that man and only two centuries have passed
since I saw him,
he didn't walk on horseback or in a carriage:
only on foot
he undid
the distances
and he didn't carry a sword or armor,
but nets on his shoulder,
axe or hammer or shovel,
he never beat any of his kind:
his feat was against water or land,
against wheat so there would be bread,
against the giant tree so it would give firewood,
against the walls to open the doors,
against the sand building walls
and against the sea to make it give birth.

I met him and he's still vivid in my memory.

The carriages fell to pieces,
war destroyed doors and walls,
the city was a handful of ashes,
all the clothes turned to dust,
and he for me remains,
survives in the sand,
when before it seemed
everything was unforgettable except him.

In the coming and going of families
sometimes it was my father or my relative
or barely him or if not him
maybe that one who never returned home
because water or land swallowed him
or a machine or a tree killed him
or it was that mourning carpenter
who walked behind the coffin, without tears,
someone in the end who had no name,
who was called metal or wood,
and whom others looked down upon
not seeing the ant
but the anthill
and when his feet no longer moved,
because the poor tired man had died,
they never saw that they didn't see him:
there were already other feet where he had been.

The other feet were himself,
also the other hands,
the man succeeded:
when it seemed to have passed
he was himself again,
there he was again digging soil,
cutting cloth, but shirtless,
there he was and wasn't, like back then,
he had gone and was back again,
and since he never had a cemetery,
no tomb, and his name wasn't engraved
on the stone he sweated to cut,
no one ever knew when he arrived
and no one knew when he died,
so only when the poor man could
he resurrected again unnoticed.

He was undoubtedly the man, without heritage,
without a cow, without a flag,
and he didn't stand out among the others,
the others who were him,
from above he was gray like the underground,
his skin was tanned,
he was yellow harvesting wheat,
he was black under the mine,
he was the color of stone in the castle,
in the fishing boat he was the color of tuna
and the color of a horse in the meadow:
how could anyone distinguish him
if he was inseparable, the element,
earth, coal or sea dressed as a man?

Where he lived, everything grew
that the man touched:
the hostile stone
broken
by his hands,
became order*
and one by one they formed
the straight clarity of the building,
he made bread with his hands,
he moved the trains,
distances were populated with villages,
other men grew,
the bees arrived,
and because the man creates and multiplies
spring walked to the market
among bakeries and doves.

The father of bread was forgotten,
he who cut and walked, crushing
and opening furrows, carrying sand,
when everything existed he no longer existed,
he gave his existence, that was all.
He went to work elsewhere, and later
he went to die rolling
like a stone from the river:
death carried him downstream.

I, who knew him, saw him descending
until he was nothing but what he left:
streets he could barely know,
houses he would never and never inhabit.

And I see him again, and every day I wait.

I see him in his coffin and resurrected.

I distinguish him among all
those who are his equals
and it seems to me it can't be,
that this way we're not going anywhere,
that happening like this has no glory.

* Alfredo Zitarrosa says