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Ode to Stalin - Pablo Neruda

Comrade Stalin, I was besides the sea on the Isla Negra,
resting from the struggle and the travels,
when the message about your death came like a blow from the ocean.
First, there was the silence, the universal stupor, and then from the sea came a
great wave.
From algae, metals and people, rocks, foam and tears was made that
wave.
From history, space and time it gathered its material
and was rising over the world, crying
before it came before me to strike the coast
and threw down its message of mourning before my doors
with a giant shout,
as if, suddenly, the earth had broken apart.
 
It was in 1914.
In the factories, trash and pain were building up.
The rich of the new century
Were dividing the petrol and the islands, the copper and the channels among themselves piece by piece.
Not a single flag raised its colours
without splashes of blood.
From Hong Kong to Chicago, the police
was searching for documents and testing
the machine guns on the flesh of the people.
From dawn on, the military marches
were sending the soldiers to die.
Frenzied was the dance of the gringos
in the smoke-filled bars of Paris.
Humanity was bleeding out.
A rain of blood
fell on the planet,
smearing the stars.
Then, death for the first time used steel armour.
The hunger
on the roads of Europe
was like an icy wind, blowing off dry leaves and piercing bones.
The autumn blew through the rags.
The war had frayed the roads.
The odour of winter and blood
came from Europe
like from an abandoned slaughterhouse.
Meanwhile, the owners
of coal,
of iron,
of steel,
of soot,
of the banks,
of gas,
of gold,
of flour,
of saltpeter,
of the daily newspaper El Mercurio,
the owners of the brothels,
the North American senators,
the buccaneers
loaded with gold and blood
of all the countries,
were as well the owners
of History.
There they were sitting,
wearing dress coats, very busy
with giving out decorations,
with giving checks at the entrance
and stealing them at the exit,
with giving out shares of the slaughter
and dividing by pieces
pieces of peoples and and geography.
Then, with modest
clothing and a worker's cap,
entered the wind,
entered the wind of the people.
That was Lenin.
He changed the land, the human, the life.
The free revolutionary air
overturned the tarnished
papers. A homeland was born
that hasn't stopped growing.
It is big as the world, but fits into
the heart of the
smallest
worker of a power plant or an office,
of agriculture or a ship.

That was the Soviet Union.
Besides Lenin,
Stalin advanced,
and so, with a white blouse,
with a grey worker's cap,
Stalin,
with his quiet steps,
entered into History, accompanied
by Lenin and by the wind.
From then on, Stalin
was building. Everything
that was needed. Lenin received from the tsars
spider webs and rags.
Lenin left a legacy
of the free and wide homeland.
Stalin filled it
with schools and flour,
printing plants and apple trees.
From the Volga
to the snow
of the unreachable North
Stalin put his hand and from his hand,
a man began to build.
Cities were born.
The deserts, for the first time,
sang with the voice of water.
The minerals
flowed together,
left
their dark dreams,
got up,
weaved rails, wheels,
locomotives, wires,
that carried the electric syllables
through all the area and distance.
Stalin
built.
From his hands
were born
grains,
tractors,
teachings,
roads,
and he was over there,
simple like you and like me,
if only you and me were to were able to
be as simple as him.
But we will learn it.
His simpleness and his wisdom,
his structure
of soft bread and unbending steel
helps us to be men every day,
every day, it helps us to be men.
Be men! That is
Stalin's law!
Being a communist is difficult.
It must be learned.
Being communist men
is even more difficult
and must be learned from Stalin,
his serene vehemence,
his precise clarity,
his disdain
for empty tinsel,
for empty editorial abstraction.
He went straightly,
untying the knot
and showing the straight
clarity of the line,
approaching problems
without phrases that hide
the emptiness,
right into the weak centre
that we will rectify in our struggle,
pruning the leaves
and showing the essence of the fruits.
Stalin is the midday,
the ripeness of the human and the people.
In the war,
the burned cities saw him
extracting the hope
from the debris,
reworking it again,
turning it into steel,
and attacking with its rays,
destroying
the fortress of darkness.
But he also helped the apple trees
of Siberia
to give their fruits under the storm.
He taught everyone
to grow, to grow,
the plants and metals,
the creatures and the rivers,
he taught them to grow,
to give fruits and fire.
He taught Peace
and thus, he stopped
with his outstretched chest
the wolves of war.
 
Before the sea of the Isla Negra, in the morning,
I hoisted the flag of Chile to half-mast.
The coast was lonely, and a silvery fog
mixed itself with the solemn foam of the ocean.
In the middle of its mast, in the field of blue,
the lonely star of my homeland
seemed like a tear between the sky and the earth.
A man from the village came, greeted understandingly
and took off his hat.
A boy came and stretched his hand out to me.
A little later, the fisherman of sea urchins, the old diver
and poet,
Gonzalito, arrived to accompany me under the flag.
«He was wiser than all the people together», he told me,
looking at the sea with his old eyes, with the old
eyes of the people.
And then, for a long time, we said nothing.
A wave
shook the stones of the shore.
«But now, Malenkov will continue his work», continued
the poor fisherman in a shabby jacket, getting up.
I looked at him suprisedly, thinking: How, how did he get to know it?
From where, on this lonely coast?
And I understood that the sea has taught it him.
And there we together, a poet,
a fisherman and the sea, kept a vigil
over the distant Captain who, upon entering death,
left to all the peoples, as legacy, his life.