severer than I had imagined,
of one Miguel Hernandez,
a farmer of Orihuela.
The voice of this Miguel ,
hanging between word and earth,
the same uncertain earth
houses in Fraga are made of,
was once an architecture,
a metric voice of stone,
crystallized the way
Madrid is to newcomers .
But the voice I discerned
in the highland wind
was of tortured, beaten earth,
the earth of a threshing floor–
not the expurgated voice
of the poet's selected works
but an edition of the wind,
not found in libraries.
It was a disturbing edition,
to which many shut the window
(disturbing because the wind
frees instead of censuring).
The voice which I heard
in the wind of the highland
was Miguel's final voice
gone hoarse from war
(perhaps even harsher
in the dialect of dust;
perhaps more mutilated
in the wind's interpretation).
I saw that the beaten land
of the end of the poet's life,
land turned to stone
from so much suffering,
had multiplied itself
in those knives of sand
and had, in the process,
multiplied its edges.
