- Poems inspired by the Mexican revolution
- 1- Soft Homeland
- 2- To Zapata.
- 3- From the remote past
- 4 and 5- Instructions to change the World
- 6- The Sun
- 7- Revolution (extract)
- 8- Leaf removal
- 9-
- 10- Wake up Mexicans!
- References
The poems of the Mexican Revolution had significance in a deeply violent and unstable decade in the North American country, which had no peace or political stability for almost two decades and was never the same again.
The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 as a response to the dictatorship of more than 30 years of Porfirio Díaz; it was a popular movement against the bourgeoisie that dominated politically and economically to the detriment of the poor and disadvantaged.
Events of such magnitude, of course, influenced all the social, ideological and cultural aspects of the Mexicans of the early twentieth century, and this was therefore reflected in their literature and artistic expressions.
Although the decade of the 10s promoted the emergence of the novel of the revolution, the cinema of the revolution and the painting of the revolution, in the specific case of poetry, according to the opinion of certain researchers, it was not the most popular genre. used or featured.
This was due in part to its very structure and the inability to take a position in a setting where everyone was constantly changing sides.
For this reason, the poetry that exalted the Mexican Revolution was perhaps more prolific after the revolutionary movement and outside the Mexican borders, than within and in the heat of battle itself.
There have been numerous writers who were inspired throughout recent history by such an event, writing odes to the Mexican Revolution and its protagonists.
Poems inspired by the Mexican revolution
1- Soft Homeland
Author: Ramón López Velarde (1921)
I who only sang from the exquisite
score of intimate decorum,
today I raise my voice to the middle of the forum
in the manner of a tenor that imitates
the guttural modulation of the bass,
to cut a segment to the epic.
I will sail through the civil waves
with oars that do not weigh, because they go
like the arms of the Chuán courier who
rowed La Mancha with rifles.
I will say with a muted epic:
the country is impeccable and diamond.
Suave Patria: allow me to envelop you in
the deepest jungle music with which
you modeled everything for me to the
rhythmic beat of the axes and
woodpecker birds.
Homeland: your surface is corn,
your mines the palace of the King of Coins, and your
sky, the herons in slip
and the green lightning of the parrots.
The Child God wrote you a stable
and the devil's oil poisons.
Over your Capital, every hour flies
haggard and painted, on a cart;
and in your province, from the clock on watch
that the colipavo pigeons hover,
the bells fall like pennies.
Homeland: a mutilated territory
is dressed in calico and trinket
Soft Homeland: your house
is still so big, that the train goes along the track
like a toy store gift.
And in the hubbub of the seasons,
with your mestizo gaze, you put
immensity over hearts.
Who, on the night that frightens the frog,
did not look, before learning of the vice, on
the arm of his girlfriend, the gallant
gunpowder of artifice?
Suave Patria: in your torrid feast you
light polychrome dolphins,
and with your blond hair
the soul marries, tightrope walker,
and your two tobacco braids,
all my spirited
race of syrup dancers knows how to offer mead.
Your clay sounds like silver, and in your fist
its sonorous misery is a piggy bank;
and in the early mornings of the land,
in streets like mirrors,
the holy smell of the bakery was seen.
When we are born, you give us notes,
later, a paradise of compotes,
and then you give yourself a whole
soft country, cupboard and aviary.
To the sad and happy you say yes,
let them taste
the sting of sesame on your love tongue.
And your wedding sky, that when it thunders
with frenzied delights fills us!
Thunder from our clouds, which bathes us
with madness, drives the mountain crazy, calls out
the woman, heals the lunatic,
incorporates the dead, calls for Viaticum,
and finally collapses the lumberyards
of God, on the farmlands.
Storm thunder: I hear in your complaints
the skeletons crack in pairs;
I hear what is gone, what I have not touched yet,
and the current time with its coconut belly.
And I hear in the jump of your coming and going
oh thunder, the roulette of my life.
2- To Zapata.
Author: Pablo Neruda
When the pains
on the earth worsened, and the desolate thorn groves
were the inheritance of the peasants
and as in the past, the rapacious
ceremonial beards, and the whips,
then, flower and galloping fire…
Drunken I'm going to the capital
The
land shaken with knives reared up in the transitory dawn,
the pawn from its bitter burrows
fell like a shelled corn on
the dizzying solitude,
to ask the boss
who sent me to call
Zapata then it was land and dawn.
The multitude of his armed seed appeared on the entire horizon.
In an attack of waters and borders
the iron spring of Coahuila,
the stellar stones of Sonora;
everything came ahead of him,
his agrarian storm of horseshoes.
That if he leaves the ranch
he will return very soon.
Distribute the bread, the land;
I accompany you.
I renounce my celestial eyelids,
I, Zapata, I go with the dew
of the morning knights,
in a shot from the nopales
to the houses with pink walls.
little ribbons for your hair, don't cry for your Pancho…
The moon sleeps on the saddles,
Death piled up and distributed
lies with the soldiers of Zapata.
The dream hides under the bulwarks
of the heavy night its destiny,
its dark sheet incubator.
The bonfire gathers the sleepless air;
grease, sweat and night powder.
… Drunk, I'm going to forget…
We ask homeland for the humiliated.
Your knife divides the heritage
and the shots and steeds frighten
the punishments, the beard of the executioner.
The land is divided with a rifle.
Do not wait, dusty peasant,
after your sweat the complete light
and the parceled sky on your knees.
Get up and gallop with Zapata.
I wanted to bring it, he said no…
Mexico, sullen agriculture, beloved
land distributed among the dark ones; Your sweating centurions
came out from the backs of the corn
to the sun.
From the southern snow I come to sing to you.
Let me gallop into your destiny
and fill myself with gunpowder and plowshares.
… What if he will cry
why to return.
3- From the remote past
Author: Salvador Novo
From the remote past
on the great pyramids of Teotihuacán,
on the teocalis and volcanoes,
on the bones and crosses of the golden conquerors,
time grows in silence.
Blades of grass
in the dust, on the cold graves;
Whitman loved her innocent and wild perfume.
Our heroes
have been dressed as puppets
and crushed into the pages of books
for veneration and remembrance of the studious childhood,
and Father Hidalgo,
Morelos and the Corregidora de Querétaro.
Revolution, Revolution
follow the heroes dressed as puppets,
dressed in signal words.
The literature of the revolution,
the revolutionary poetry
around three or four anecdotes of Villa
and the flourishing of the maussers,
the rubrics of the lasso, the soldadera,
the cartridge belts and the cobs,
the sickle and the Sun, proletarian painter brother,
the corridos and the songs of the peasant
and the blue overalls of the sky,
the strangled siren of the factory
and the new rhythm of the hammers
of the worker brothers
and the green patches of the ejidos
that the peasant brothers
have thrown out the priest's scarecrow.
The revolutionary propaganda pamphlets,
the Government at the service of the proletariat,
the proletarian intellectuals at the service of the Government,
the radios at the service of the proletarian intellectuals
at the service of the Government of the Revolution
to incessantly repeat its postulates
until they are engraved in the minds of the proletarians
-of the proletarians who have a radio and listen to them.
Time grows in silence,
blades of grass, dust from the graves
that barely shakes the word.
4 and 5- Instructions to change the World
Author: Verses attributed to Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation EZLN.
1- Build a rather concave sky. Paint yourself green or brown, earthy and beautiful colors. Splash clouds at will.
Carefully hang a full moon in the west, say three-quarters above the respective horizon. On the east began, slowly, the ascent of a bright and powerful sun. Gather men and women together, speak slowly and lovingly to them, they will start walking by themselves. Contemplate with love the sea. Rest on the seventh day.
2- Gather the necessary silences.
Forge them with sun and sea and rain and dust and night. With patience go sharpening one of its ends. Choose a brown suit and a red scarf. Wait for the dawn and, with the rain to go, march to the big city.
Upon seeing it, the tyrants will flee in terror, running over each other.
But, don't stop! The fight is just beginning.
6- The Sun
Author: Gutiérrez Cruz
Round and red sun
like a copper wheel,
you're looking at me every day
and everyday you look at me poor
7- Revolution (extract)
Author: Manuel Maples Arce (1927)
Night inside
the soldiers
they ripped
chest
popular songs.
(…)
Military trains
that go to the four cardinal points, to the baptism of blood
where everything is confusion, and drunk men
they play cards
and to human sacrifices;
sound and martial trains
where we did singing the Revolution.
Far away, pregnant women
they have been begging
for us
to the Stone Christs.
8- Leaf removal
Author: Gregorio López y Fuentes (1914)
There are many rare gems in the clear glass case
of heaven, which he has dressed in his richest finery,
and the moon is snowing as if a peregrine heron were
flying, defoliating the feathers of its wings.
You stand up like a sharp thorn
and look me in the eye; with your hand, to
which the moon, which speck, if it just flours,
a flower that you hate in the air, detaches them.
You see how the petals flee and you become very sad
and you sob and moan because you could not get out
their secret; then slowly
next to your shoulders damp with the moon and ashes
"from your garden it is" - I tell you - and I recline my forehead
and pleasantly open your lips in smiles.
9-
Author: Manuel Maples Arce (1924)
Here is my
brutal
and multanimous poem
to the new city.
Oh city all taut
with cables and efforts,
all sound
of engines and wings.
Simultaneous explosion
of the new theories
a little further
In the space plane
of Whitman and Turner
and a little more here
of Maples Arce.
Russia's lungs are
blowing
the wind of social revolution towards us.
Literary zip-flys will
understand nothing
of this new
sweaty beauty of the century,
and the
ripe moons
that fell
are this rot
that comes to us
from the intellectual culverts.
Here is my poem:
O strong
and multiple city,
made entirely of iron and steel!
The quays. The docks.
The cranes.
And the
factory sex fever.
Urbe:
Tram escorts
that run through the subversist streets.
The shop windows assault the sidewalks,
and the sun plunders the avenues.
On the sidelines of the
tariff days of telephone poles,
momentary landscapes parade
through elevator tube systems.
Suddenly,
oh the
green flash in his eyes!
Under the naive blinds of the hour
the red battalions pass.
The cannibalistic romanticism of Yankee music
has been making its nests in the necks.
Oh international city!
Towards which remote meridian did
that ocean liner cut?
I feel that everything is moving away.
The faded twilights
float through the masonry of the panorama.
Spectral trains that go
there
far away, panting with civilizations.
The disgruntled crowd
musically splashes through the streets
And now, the thieving bourgeois will start to tremble
at the flows
that they stole from the people,
but someone hid
the spiritual pentagram of the explosive under their dreams.
Here is my poem:
Pennants of cheers in the wind,
burning hair
and captive mornings in the eyes.
Oh musical city
made entirely of mechanical rhythms!
Tomorrow, perhaps,
only the living fire of my verses will
illuminate the humbled horizons.
10- Wake up Mexicans!
Author: Ignacio López Tarso (1966)
Wake up Mexicans now
Those who have not been able to see
Who are shedding blood
For raising the Other to Power
Poor Mexican Nation!
How bad your luck has been;
Your children still have more
misfortune to see you.
Look at my Dear Homeland,
just how it is getting;
That all of his bravest men
are Betraying them.
Where is Chief Zapata?
That his sword no longer shines?
Where is the Braco del Norte?
What was Don Francisco Villa?
There were the 3 pelonas Sitting in the Window
La Cuca, La Petra, the crazy one from Soledad
And then a Soldier arrived wanting to take them
One said what if
The other said what not
One said yes
And to Tine I took them
They were leaders first
That they wielded the steel;
Until
Don Francisco I. Madero came to power.
But what was Madero deluded?
Well, when he came to power;
He
wanted to ignore Pancho Villa and Zapata.
I have not seen a Candidate
Who is not a Convenecer;
When they rise to Power They do
n't know a partner
Zapata told Villa
-We already lost the Albur;
You will attack from the north,
and I will attack from the south.
With this I say goodbye
Why are we going;
This is where the Corrido ends:
Wake up Mexicans.
References
- Katharina Niemeyer. "That hardly shakes the word". Mexican poetry in the face of the Revolution. Recovered from cervantesvirtual.com.
- Mariana Gaxiola. 3 exquisite poems about the Mexican Revolution. Recovered from mxcity.mx.
- From yesterday to the future: Long live Zapata! And long live the Zapatista! Recovered from zocalopoets.com
- Poetry in Mexico during the years of the Revolution. Recovered from pavelgranados.blogspot.com.ar.
- The subverted eden: poems of the Mexican Revolution. Recovered from elem.mx.
- Poets of the world. Gregorio López and Fuente. Recovered from rincondelpoetasmajo.blogspot.com.ar.
- Mexican Revolution. Recovered from historiacultural.com.
- Mexican Revolution. Recovered from lahistoriamexicana.mx.
- Mexican Revolution. Recovered from es.wikipedia.org.