Excerpt from “The Heights of Macchu Picchu” (Pablo Neruda)

I come to speak through your dead mouth
Join together across the earth
all the silent scattered lips
and speak to me from below, all this long night
as if I were anchored among you,
tell me everything, chain by chain,
link by link, and step by step
sharpen the knives that you kept
place them in my breast, my hand,
like a river of yellow beams,
like a river of buried tigers,
and let me weep, hours, days, years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

Give me silence, water, hope.

Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.

Cling to me, bodies, like magnets.

Resort to my veins and my mouth.

Speak through my words and my blood.