FATE OF BLOOD (SINO SANGRIENTO), A POEM BY MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ

From blood that comes from blood I come to be
I come, like oceans also come from water
the color of my soul is that of poppies,
my fate is just like poppies of misfortune
I come from crimson poppy-spawning poppies
My fate and I do crash, a grisly goring.

Some creatures came before
and came from lands of sand where nothing grows,
and more than one have come
with raging horoscopes,
under a moon that's turbulent and evil.

A stroke fell down to Earth
and set a bloody footprint in my life,
a planet of saffron in heat fell down,
as well as an angry crimson cloud,
a wounded sea fell down, a sky fell down.

I came to life pain-stabbed,
a knife was waiting for me to arrive,
a milk that was bad was given for me to suckle,
the juice of a sword that was mad, homicidal,
and in the sun I first opened my eye
And the very first thing I saw was a gash
and it was a sad one.

Blood is out to get me, so hungry and fierce,
since the day of my founding,
and even before I was
uttered, pronounced, shoved,
into this greedy wasteland by my mother.
It pulls me by my feet, and by my side,
hard and harder each time, towards the pit.

I fight against this blood, and I debate
against so many claws, so many veins,
and each body that I stumble upon
it is another splurt of blood, another chain.

Although they're light, the darts of oats
add to the ensigns of my chest:
on it I had the love of farming,
and my soul that is a fallow
has deeply furrowed
with irrevocable wounds my hope
with the death-wish of my plow.

All the tools are watching me:
the ax has left me
recondite marks;
the stones, days and desires
they dug springs in my body
that were swallowed only by sands
and melancholies.

The chains are bigger and bigger,
the snakes are bigger and bigger,
bigger and crueler is their power,
bigger are their rings around me,
bigger is their heart, bigger is mine.

In this bedroom filled with nothing,
where only visits meet,
the peck and the color of a crow,
a handful of letters and written passions,
a fistful of blood and a death I keep.

O fulminating blood,
O climbing roar of purple,
sentencing that sounds at all hours
under the suffering anvil of my temples!

Blood has given birth to me , it has imprisoned me
Blood reduces me and makes me larger,
a building of blood I am, of plaster,
that tears itself down and then it rises
on the scaffold of my bones.

A dead bricklayer made of blood,
rains and everyday he hangs his shirt
in the surroundings of my eye,
and every night with my soul,
or even with my eyelashes I carry him.

Blood is growing, it enlarges
the expansion of his foliage in my chest
that, overflowing poplar, gets out of hand
and in several grim rivers it falls undone.

I see myself suddenly
wrapped in its angry torrents,
and I swim against all desperately
like against a fatal stream of daggers.

His current drags me enraged,
it tears me to pieces, sinks me, runs me over;
I want to separate from it, I fight it,
but my arms are taken with it,
and my desire, it goes away with my arms.

I will allow myself to be washed away, in pieces,
since thus has been ordered to my life
by the blood and by its tide, and by the bodies
and by my own star of blood and gore.

I'll be a lonely, swollen wound
until in my swelling I am
a corpse of foam: just wind and nothing.

Miguel Hernández

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