851. Easter of Resurrection, by Antonio Machado

Look: the arc of life traces
a rainbow on the greening fields.
Seek your loves, young maidens,
where the spring emerges from rock.
Where water laughs and dreams and flows,
that's where love's ballad is sung.
Eyes born closed to light,
held in your arms will gaze one day,
astonished, at spring sun,
eyes that will grow blind as they depart from life.
Won't there drink, one day, at your breast
those who will work the earth tomorrow?
Oh, celebrate this bright Sunday
young mothers in flower, new life within you!
Bask in the smile from your earthly mother.
The storks are already settled in their beautiful nests
and they scribble on the towers in their white scrawl.
Mosses on the peaks gleam like emeralds.
Between the oaks, black bulls
graze on sparse grass,
and the shepherd tending his sheep
leaves his brown cape on the mountainside.

(trans Mary G. Berg & Dennis Maloney)

Source: The Landscape of Castile

927. To a Dry Elm, by Antonio Machado

The old elm, split by lightning
and half rotted
with April rain and May sun,
has sprouted a few green leaves.

The hundred-year-old elm on a hill
lapped by the Duero! A yellowish moss
stains the bleached bark
of the crumbling, worm-eaten trunk.

Unlike the singing poplars
that guard roads and riverbanks,
it won't be a home to nightingales.

An army of ants in a single line
climbs up its side and spiders weave
their gray webs in its hollowed core.

Elm by the Duero, before you are felled
by the woodman's ax and the carpenter
transforms you into a bell tower,
a wagon axle or cart's yoke;
before you are a red flame on
tomorrow's hearth in some poor cottage
along the side of the road;
before a whirlwind uproots you,
and the wind from the white sierras snaps you;
before the river pushes you to the sea
through valleys and ravines,
elm, I want to note
the grace of your greening branch.
My heart also waits in hope,
turned toward light and life,
for another miracle of spring.

(trans Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney)

Source: The Landscape of Castile

957. Poetry, by Antonio Machado

In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps
one spark of the planet's early fires
trapped forever in its net of ice,
it's not love's later heat that poetry holds,
but the atom of the love that drew it forth
from the silence: so if the bright coal of his love
begins to smoulder, the poet hears his voice
suddenly forced, like a bar-room singer's - boastful
with his own huge feeling, or drowned by violins;
but if it yields a steadier light, he knows
the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound
like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene.

Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water
sings of nothing, not your name, not mine.

(trans - loosely - by Don Paterson)

Source: The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry

993. Road, by Antonio Machado

Traveler, your footprints are
the only path, the only track:
wayfarer, there is no way,
there is no map or Northern star,
just a blank page and a starless dark;
and should you turn round to admire
the distance that you've made today
the road will billow into dust.
No way on and no way back,
there is no way, my comrade: trust
your own quick step, the end's delay,
the vanished trail of your own wake,
wayfarer, sea-walker, Christ.

(trans - loosely - by Don Paterson)

Source: The White Lie: New and Selected Poetry, by Don Paterson