iN my working life...

What is the poet to do when he sees every day the ones who come back from war, missing parts of themselves, seen and unseen. What is the poet to do when every day he sees what is called a "burden" by those who do not carry, a "duty" by those who only command... Who sends another to fight in a situation that only angers another?

Who knows how to replace illusions with dreams in the young?

At the Navy/Marine hospital, some days can seem pretty rough …

At a speech given at the University of Concepción in southern Chile in 1968, poet Pablo Neruda said:

“Perhaps the duties of the poet have been the same throughout history. Poetry was honored to go out into the streets, to take part in combat after combat. When they called him 'rebel', the poet was not daunted. Poetry is rebellion. The poet is not offended if he is called subversive. Life is more important than societal structures, and there are new regulations for the soul. Seeds spring up everywhere. All ideals are exotic. Every day we await momentous changes — we are experiencing the excitement of a mutation in the human order: spring incites rebellion.
"We poets hate hatred and make war on war.

"Only a few weeks ago, in the heart of New York, I began my reading with some verses of Walt Whitman. Only that morning, I had bought still another copy of his Leaves of Grass. When I opened it in my hotel room on Fifth Avenue the first thing I read were these lines, which I had never particularly noticed before:

Away with themes of war! away with war itself!
Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken’d, mutilated
corpses!
That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for lop-tongued wolves, not
reasoning men.

"(When I read those lines that night) These lines brought an instantaneous response. The public that overflowed the auditorium stood and applauded wildly. Unknowingly, through the words of the bard Walt Whitman, I had touched the anguished heart of the North American people. The destruction of defenseless hamlets, napalm burning entire villages of Vietnamese — all this, through the words of a poet who lived a hundred years ago, condemning injustice with his poetry — was palpable and visible to those who were listening.
"Would that my poems were so lasting — the poetry already written, and the poetry still to come.”

[translated by Margaret Sayers Peden]