by Pablo Neruda
By the cathedrals, clotting
The walls, they deploy
With their bundles, their black looks, their limbs
Ripped tins of provender,
Teh livid increase of the gargoyles;
Beyond, on the obdurate
Unction of stone
They nuture a gutter-flower, the flower
Of legitimized plague, in migrations.
The park had its paupers
Like its trees of extortionate
Foliage and root-forms:
At the garden's margin, the slave,
Like a sink at the verge of humanity,
Content with his tainted dissymmetry
Supine by the broom of his dying.
Though charity bury them
In the pit of the pestilence,
They suffice for human conditions: they prefigure us.
Our wisdom to this: to trample them under,
To harry the breed in the sties of contempt,
Servility's creatures, wearing servility's livery-
We may show them our bootsoles
Or interpret their lack in or of nature.
American panhandlers, '48's
Offspring, grandsons
Of church doors, I do not comment you.
I will not invest you with ivory usages,
The rhetorists' figure, monarchical beards,
Or explain you away with a book, like the others
I efface you, and hope -
Who never will enter my discipline's love,
Neither you nor your pieties, nor pass to my pity.
I exile your dust from the earth
And those who contrived you to soil
A contemptible image-
Till metals remake you
And you issue and blaze like a blade
