One final poem in a series one this time,
and I ask apologies in advance for my Spanish accent
when I quote two lines from Garcia Lorca that
are too familiar, I'm sure to all of you to translate.
This is called "October, 1973," it
was written at the time of the overthrow of the Allende
government by the Chilean Junta.
The poem is transcribed, not based on, but transcribed
from a dream as simply and as an ornamented as I could make it.
There is a character in the poem named Barbara and when
I describe what she did as a young woman that is all true,
but the rest of the poem is the dream.
And the figure in the dream who was very much on my mind,
sleeping and waking was the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra
who had gone back to Chile just weeks before
and had been trapped there by the revolution.
October 1973.
Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New
York, looking for help for you Nicanor,
but my few friends who are rich or influential
were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel
suites.
They had gone to the opera or flown for the weekend
to Bermuda.
At last, I found one or two of them
at home preparing for social engagements,
absently smiling as they tried on gown after gown, until heaps
of rich beautiful fabric were strewn over the chairs
and sofas.
They posed before mirrors with their diamonds and trinkets
and floor length furs.
Smiling at me from the mirror, they vaguely promised help.
They became distracted by constantly ringing phones,
by obsequious secretaries bustling in with packages,
flowers, messages, all the paraphernalia,
all part of the uninterruptible round of the rich.
The nice rich, smiling soothingly
as they touch their hair or picked up
their phone extensions.
Absently patting my arm they smiled, it will be all right.
Dusk fell on the city as I ran naked weeping into the street.
I ran to the home of Barbara, my friend, who
was a young girl rescued for loyalist soldiers
from a Spanish prison.
In her teenage sweater set and saddle shoes and knee socks,
she drove an old car sagging with loyalist pamphlets
across the Pyrenees, all the way to Paris without being caught.
And not long ago, she helped save a group of Basques
from Franco's sentence of death.
In my dream, Barbara telephones Barcelona.
I realize this isn't quite right but just stand there paralyzed
as one does in dreams.
Then dimly from the other end of the line
through the chatter of international operators we hear
artillery fire, the faint tones of lost men,
craft voices singing "Los Quatros Generales"
through the pulsations of the great twisted cable
under the ocean.
Agonía, Agonía, sueño, fermente y sueño.
Este es el mundo, amigo, agonía, agonía.
"No, Barbara!"
I scream, "We are not back there,
that's the old revolution.
Call up the new one.
Though I know that every day your friends
Nicanor telephone Santiago where the number rings and rings
and rings with never an answer.
And now the rings are turning into nils, the church
bells of Santiago tolling the funeral of Neruda,
his poems looted, his autobiography stolen,
his books desecrated in his house on Isla Negra."
And among the smashed glass, the broken furniture,
his desk overturned, the ruined book strewn over the floor
lie the great floral wreaths from the Swedish Academy.
The wreaths from Paris, South Asia, the whole world over,
and the bells toll on.
Then I tell Barbara to hang up the phone,
but she dials the number again, then turns to me smiling,
smiling like an angel, he is there.
Trembling, I take the phone from her
and hear your voice, Nicanor.
Sad, humorous, infinitely disillusion,
infinitely consoling.
Dear Carolyn, it is Nicanor.
And the connection is broken because I wake up
in this white room, in this white silence,
in this backwater of silence, on this Isla Blanca.
Nicanor, Nicanor, are you too silent under the earth?
Brother, brother.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]