Cloud and Greater Sky

--To the militia from within and without

Because in Spain the voice burned,

The floral womb of the woman
pregnant with the world burned,

The sad naked artery burned,

The brief humus of men burned,

The humid estuary of your total
and crowned dagger burned.

Because in Spain
the girls' eyelids were covered
with luxurious corpses

and the truncated dawn
dreamed of bishops and medusas,
and man murmured his candid stature
beyond his conquered death,

Because in Spain
the Spanish militiaman
was covered with aching debris,
and your quick sky was stabbed,

While the mourners
lost your wide journey of magnolias,
and they stirred
the popular grace of horse-drawn mills
until it all was transformed,
you were in the rainy season of your blood,

and your body,
with the air of a struggling dove,
crossed this smooth disorder of equators,
this easy tenderness of the faces of America.

Health
Spanish militiaman
to your miliary front
and to the turbulent excellence of your blood,

Health to your raised cheek,

Health
Spanish militiaman

Disciple tattooed
in the strange cover of Guernica,

Health to the spine of your sword,

Because in Spain,
when the mourners
grazed on your reddened sweetness,
and ate of your spilled flesh,
you were like a scholastic angel
in the corner of the world,

like a sun opened with your wound,

Health
Spanish militiaman
original shouting of beheaded days,

Collapsed wound at the doors of mankind,

so that mankind would hear
your fragrance of anger
and welcome
the high decay of your waist,
the warm color of your harmony,

Health to your melancholy gesture among the rocks
the laconic silhouette,
the gaze wrapped in a tear,

Health
up to your most intimate heart,
and in your most intimate sweat,
and up to the dorsal
of your most forgotten bone,
disordered and high,

Health to this your wasted death,
your death now humid and lonely
health to the shelter of the olive tree,

Health
Spanish militiaman,

Dynamiter who burns your mouth
up in arms and your clamor
at your belt,

Health unto your executed boy
whose navel is marked amid your forehead,

Health
Spanish militiaman

Because when in Spain
the archbishops staved Christ,
and trampled his thigh and long fingers,
you were a divided face
with your sex full
of eternally dark weeks.
Because when the half-faced soldiers
mutilated the pregnant age
and masturbated the mind with an umbrella,
you were closed to all the bloods,
standing over all the assaults,
and the smooth, destitute corolla of your body
had a voice for your own body,

Health
funereal and beautiful Host,

Health
amid your lonely forehead that is shelter
to the olive tree;

because even
among the clocks of the writing desks
and dressing tables,
the archbishops and the half-faced traitors
masturbated the mind with an umbrella,
and in your Spain,
in mine,
in the Spain of all,
your body still burns like an assaulted carnation.

Here,
friend,

Spanish militiaman
our populated brother,
over your heart of dust and rifle-shot
we are standing at the start of harvest,

Over that which it seems has broken down in tears,

We are all
showing as much brightness as a tear.

We are the magnificent passionate beings,
the small and exalted
always blooming,

those whose face will prevail,

We are all
waiting over the erect stone,
we are those from within and without,

we are all Americans.