Don Miguel Hernández was born in Orihuela ago 110 years a day like today. One of the greatest and essential poets of Spanish literature left us too early and too young. This year it has also been the 75th anniversary of his death in 1942 from tuberculosis. But every October 30 we celebrate again that it is ours, that it wrote in our beautiful language and that it left us a legacy of the most beautiful verses that can be found.

Sad wars, Day laborers, Last song, Onion nana, Hands… They are so many and so good. Worth this simple tribute to his figure and art remembering part of his work with a selection of my favorite verses and poems. 

Miguel Hernandez Gilabert

Born in Orihuela on October 30, 1910 and he was also a playwright besides being a poet. It was from a humble family and he had to leave school very early to go to work as a pastor. But it was a great reader of classical poetry (Garcilaso, Góngora, Quevedo or San Juan de la Cruz) and thus found his inspiration and ability for poetry.

It was from 1930 when it started publish his poetry in magazines like The Town of Orihuela o Alicante Day. In that decade he went to Madrid and he also collaborated in different publications, which allowed him to interact with more poets of the time. When Orihuela returned he wrote Expert in Moons, where you can see the influence of the authors he read in his childhood and those he met on that trip to Madrid.

When he returned to Madrid to settle down, he worked as editor in the Cossío's bullfighting dictionary and the Pedagogical missions scored by Alejandro Casona. It is in these years when he wrote poems like The violated whistle e Image of your footprint, and the best known The lightning that never stops.

During the Civil War composed Village wind y Man stalks, titles of what was called "war poetry." After the fight, tried to leave Spain, but he was arrested on the border with Portugal. His death sentence at first it was commuted to that of thirty years. In jail it ended Songbook and ballads of absences. But he got sick of tuberculosis and died on March 28, 1942 in the Alicante prison.

Selection of verses

Onion nana

Perhaps of his most beautiful and shocking poems that the poet wrote in prison in response to his wife's letter. They had lost their first child a year before and she told him that in those days she only ate bread and onion.

Onion is frost
closed and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
big and round.

In the cradle of hunger
my child was.
With onion blood
breastfed.
But your blood
frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.

A brunette woman
resolved on moon
thread by thread is spilled
over the crib.
Laugh, child
that I bring you the moon
when necessary.

Lark of my house,
laugh a lot.
It's your laugh in your eyes
the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul to hear you
beat space.

Your laugh sets me free
it gives me wings.
Solitudes take me away,
jail takes me away.
Mouth that flies,
heart that on your lips
flashes. […]

Olive trees

Andalusians of Jaén,
haughty olive trees,
tell me in my soul: who,
who raised the olive trees?

They were not raised by nothing,
neither the money, nor the lord,
but the quiet land,
work and sweat.

United to pure water
already united planets,
the three gave the beauty
of the twisted trunks.

Get up, gray olive tree,
they said at the foot of the wind.
And the olive tree raised a hand
powerful foundation. […]

The boy of the night

Laughing, clearly mocking the day,
the child I wanted to be twice sank into the night.
I didn't want the light anymore. So that? Would not come out
more of those silences and those gloom.

I wanted to be… What for?… I wanted to arrive joyful
to the center of the sphere of all that exists.
I wanted to bring laughter as the most beautiful thing.
I have died smiling serenely sad.

Child twice child: three times to come.
Roll back into that opaque world of the belly.
Back off, love. Back off, child, because I don't want to
go out where the light finds its great sadness. […]

Song of the soldier husband

I have populated your belly with love and sowing,
I have prolonged the echo of blood to which I respond
and I wait on the furrow as the plow waits:
I've reached the bottom

Brunette with high towers, high light and high eyes,
wife of my skin, great drink of my life,
your crazy breasts grow towards me jumping
conceived doe.

It seems to me that you are a delicate crystal,
I fear that you will break me at the slightest stumble,
and reinforce your veins with my soldier skin
out like the cherry tree.

Mirror of my flesh, sustenance of my wings,
I give you life in the death that they give me and I do not take.
Woman, woman, I want you surrounded by bullets,
craved for lead. […]

Boca

Mouth that drags my mouth:
mouth that you have dragged me:
mouth that you come from far away
to illuminate me with rays.

Alba that you give to my nights
a red and white glow.
Mouth populated with mouths:
bird full of birds
Song that returns the wings
up and down.
Death reduced to kisses
thirsty to die slowly,
you give to the bleeding grass
two fiery flaps.
The lip above the sky
and the earth the other lip.

Kiss that rolls in the shadow:
rolling kiss
from the first cemetery
until the last stars.
Astro that has your mouth
muted and closed
until a light blue touch
makes your eyelids vibrate. […]

I call bull Spain

Rise, bull of Spain: get up, wake up.
Wake up completely, bull of black foam,
that you breathe the light and ooze the shadow,
and you concentrate the seas under your closed skin.

Wake up

Wake up completely, I see you asleep,
a piece of the chest and another of the head:
that you have not yet woken up like a bull wakes up
when he is attacked with wolfish betrayals.

Get up.

Snort your power, unfold your skeleton,
raise your forehead with the resounding axes,
with the two tools to scare the stars,
to threaten the sky with antlers of tragedy.

Smear me.

[...]

Source of the biography: Instituto Cervantes