The Death of Pablo Neruda,
September 23, 1973

At 10:30PM,
according to official hospital records,
recorded at the right-wing, private
Clinica Santa Maria in Santiago,
the poet died without dignity,
the irony being that the poet
would be brought there for his last day,
his revolutionary poems muted in that private room,
where he either died of cancer or a political assassination.
Who knows?
Neruda’s death was another wave
slamming against the rocks of eternity.

Today,
on the day of his death,
we could think of him writing his poems
at a writing desk using green ink
to say what he had to say about anything or nothing,
for he was that way, his words at times,
rupturing out like endless lava from a volcano.
On that harsh, rocky cliff,
at Casas de Isla Negra,
his last home on this earth,
where he could see and hear the waves crashing
up and down like cascades of thunder,
the poet, with all his worldly controversies,
could imagine the world he created
with romantic words
falling like sea spay
into the boiling cauldron of the endless sea.

He would write his last poem, “Finale”—
those words of loss of sleep, bleeding out blood
in a foreign bed, that terror of dying at night
among his enemies in white medical coats,
with only a naïve vision of the world being bluer,
as his wife’s hands gave him solace
in a brutish, hardened world.

 

Luis Lázaro Tijerina is a military historian and military theorist. He is a published author. Mr. Tijerina admit that he writes poetry and paints easel works as an outlet for the more intense work that he does from a professional position.