PABLO NERUDA AT MACHU PICCHU 201forgotten workers, such as “Jack Stonebreaker, son of Wiracocha” the Incan
creator god,
Rise to be born with me, brother.
Give me your hand out of the deep
region seeded by all your grief.Then abruptly he turns:
You won’t come back from bottom rock.
No coming back from time under ground.No volverán ...No volverán. Earth and time won’t release them, so echoing
Whitman’s “Through me many long dumb voices,” Neruda takes on the bur-
den: “Hasten to my veins to my mouth. / Speak through my words and my
blood.”
AfterAlturas de Macchu Picchu, his finest work, Neruda went on writing and
traveling for a quarter-century. No less popular than his love poems are the
odes to everything under the sun, such as the “Ode to Laziness,” rendered by
William Carlos Williams. Stones of Chile, Where the Rain Is Born, Art of Birds,
Bestiary, House in the Sand, Grapes and the Wind, Isla Negra Notebook, Winter
Garden, The Sea and the Bells and more flowed from his green felt-tip pen. He
can’t get enough of his native land.
When the brutal coup struck on September 11, 1973, sponsored by the United
States, Neruda was ill and dying—not in Araucania’s “wooded and rainy land”
but on his other true soil, the seaside house at Isla Negra, still near that “precious
spume the waves lay down and break up.”