South American literary artists have always been my favorite artists among the rest of the world. They're not as dramatic as Iranian ones, as excessively-sophisticated as eastern Europe ones or as dark as the Russian peers. The simplicity of their words, gives me the feeling of a mid-day siesta on a hammock in the middle of summer in a farmland !!! The words can be as soft as a lullaby or as sharp as revolution. But they all have one thing in common which is the rural sole of the authors.
For today's post, I intended to post one of political poems of Pablo Neruda, but came across to "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market".
Among the market greens,
a bullet from the ocean depths,
a swimming projectile,
I saw you,
dead.
All around you were lettuces,
sea foam of the earth,
carrots, grapes,
but of the ocean truth,
of the unknown,
of the unfathomable shadow,
the depths of the sea,
the abyss,
only you had survived,
a pitch-black, varnished witness
to deepest night.
Only you, well-aimed
dark bullet
from the abyss,
mangled at one tip,
but constantly reborn,
at anchor in the current,
winged fins windmilling
in the swift flight
of the marine shadow,
a mourning arrow,
dart of the sea,
olive, oily fish.
I saw you dead,
a deceased king
of my own ocean,
green assault, silver
submarine fir,
seed of seaquakes,
now only dead remains,
yet in all the market
yours was the only
purposeful form
amid the bewildering rout of nature;
amid the fragile greens
you were a solitary ship,
armed among the vegetables,
fin and prow black and oiled,
as if you were still
the vessel of the wind,
the one and only
pure ocean machine:
unflawed, navigating
the waters of death.
