It is with the voice of the Bible, or verse of Walt Whitman,
that we should reach you, Hunter!
Primitive and modern, simple and complicated,
with a bit of Washington and a bit of Nimrod.
You are the United States,
You are the future invader
the naive America who has Indian blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks Spanish.
You are a proud and strong exemplar of your race;
you are cultured, you are clever, you oppose Tolstoy.
And breaking horses, or murdering tigers,
you are an Alejandro Nebuchadnezzar.
(You’re a professor of energy,
as today’s madmen say.)
You think life is fire,
that progress is eruption;
where you put your bullet
you put the future.
No.
The United States is strong and big.
When it shakes there is a deep tremor
through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, you hear the roar of the lion.
Hugo said to Grant: “The stars are yours.”
(Just shining, rising, Argentine sun
and the Chilean star rises ...) You’re rich.
Join Hercules’ cult to Mammon’s;
and lighting the path to easy conquest,
Liberty raises her torch in New York.
But our America, which had poets
from the old days of Netzahualcoyotl,
you have saved in the footsteps of the great feet of Bacchus
panic in the alphabet learned a while;
who consulted the stars, that knew Atlantis,
whose name comes to resonate in Plato
Since the ancient times of your life
living light, fire, perfume, love,
America’s great Montezuma, from the Inca,
redolent of America by Christopher Columbus
Catholic American, Spanish American,
The America where noble Cuahtemoc said:
“I’m not a bed of roses” that America
trembles in hurricanes and lives in Love,
men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul lives.
And dreams. And loves, and vibrates, and is the daughter of the Sun
Be careful. Live the American Spanish!
There are thousand of puppies loose Leon Spanish.
Be required, Roosevelt, being God himself,
Rifleman the terrible and strong Hunter,
order to keep us in your tight grip.
And, You may count it all, missing one thing: God!
1903. Translation released into the public domain; translator unknown.
"Since that day till now our life is one unbroken paradise. We live a true brotherly life. Every evening after supper we take a seat under the mighty oak and sing our songs." —Extract from a letter of a Russian refugee in Texas.
Twilight is here, soft breezes bow the grass, Day's sounds of various toil break slowly off. The yoke-freed oxen low, the patient ass Dips his dry nostril in the cool, deep trough. Up from the prairie the tanned herdsmen pass With frothy pails, guiding with voices rough Their udder-lightened kine. Fresh smells of earth, The rich, black furrows of the glebe send forth. After the Southern day of heavy toil, How good to lie, with limbs relaxed, brows bare To evening's fan, and watch the smoke-wreaths coil Up from one's pipe-stem through the rayless air. So deem these unused tillers of the soil, Who stretched beneath the shadowing oak tree, stare Peacefully on the star-unfolding skies, And name their life unbroken paradise. The hounded stag that has escaped the pack, And pants at ease within a thick-leaved dell; The unimprisoned bird that finds the track Through sun-bathed space, to where his fellows dwell; The martyr, granted respite from the rack, The death-doomed victim pardoned from his cell,— Such only know the joy these exiles gain,— Life's sharpest rapture is surcease of pain. Strange faces theirs, wherethrough the Orient sun Gleams from the eyes and glows athwart the skin. Grave lines of studious thought and purpose run From curl-crowned forehead to dark-bearded chin. And over all the seal is stamped thereon Of anguish branded by a world of sin, In fire and blood through ages on their name, Their seal of glory and the Gentiles' shame. Freedom to love the law that Moses brought, To sing the songs of David, and to think The thoughts Gabirol to Spinoza taught, Freedom to dig the common earth, to drink The universal air—for this they sought Refuge o'er wave and continent, to link Egypt with Texas in their mystic chain, And truth's perpetual lamp forbid to wane. Hark! through the quiet evening air, their song Floats forth with wild sweet rhythm and glad refrain. They sing the conquest of the spirit strong, The soul that wrests the victory from pain; The noble joys of manhood that belong To comrades and to brothers. In their strain Rustle of palms and Eastern streams one hears, And the broad prairie melts in mist of tears.
This poem is in the public domain.