Tonight's Lullaby - Miguel Hernandez, "Lullaby of the Onion"

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RpWP7IdmWk

Born into a peasant family in Spain in 1910, Miguel Hernandez had little formal education but succeeded in publishing his first book of poems by age 23.

Arrested several times for opposing Franco, he died at 31 of tuberculosis contracted in prison.

In "Lullaby of the Onion," he reflects on the present condition of and future prospects for his baby son. The poem was written after he received a letter from his wife stating that she had only bread and onions to eat.

Lullaby of the Onion

(Sung by Joan Manuel Serrat)

An onion is frost
shut in and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
huge and round.

My son is lying now
in the cradle of hunger.
The blood of an onion
is what he lives on.
But it is your blood,
with sugar on it like frost,
onion and hunger.

A dark woman
turned into moonlight
pours herself down thread
by thread over your cradle.
My son, laugh,
because you can swallow the moon
when you want to.

Lark of my house,
laugh often.
Your laugh is in your eyes
the light of the world
Laugh so much
that my soul, hearing you,
will beat wildly in space.

Your laugh unlocks doors for me,
it gives me wings.
It drives my solitudes off,
pulls away my jail.
Mouth that can fly, heart that turns to
lightning on your lips.

Your laugh is the sword
that won all the wars,
it defeats the flowers
and the larks,
challenges the sun.
Future of my bones
and of my love.

The body with wings beating,
the eyelash so quick,
life is full of color
as it never was/
How many linnets
climb with wings beating
out of your body!

I woke up and was an adult:
don’t wake up.
My mouth is sad:
you go on laughing.
In your cradle, forever,
defending your laughter
feather by feather.

Your being has a flying range
so high and so wide
that your body is a newly
born sky.
I wish I could climb
back to the starting point
of your travel!

Your laugh, eight months old,
with five orange blossoms.
You have five tiny
ferocities.
You have five teeth
like five new
jasmine blossoms.

They will be the frontier
of kisses tomorrow,
when you feel your rows
of teeth are a weapon.
You will feel a flame
run along under your teeth
looking for the center.

My son, fly away, onto the
two moons of the breast:
the breast, onion-
sad, but you, content.
Stay on your feet.
Stay ignorant of what’s happening,
and what is going on.


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Miguel Hernandez, "Lullaby of the Onion," translated by Robert Bly, from Miguel Hernandez: Selected Poems, edited by Timothy Baland (Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1989).


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