At only 15 years old, Miguel Hernández would write his first verses. He dedicated them to nature, which dazzled him with its beauty and majesty while he took care of his goats. His father forced him to help him with farm chores, hence his nickname of shepherd poet, but he would not give up on his great passion for letters.
A self-taught poet, such was his delirium for poetry that in 1930 he managed to publish his first poem in a newspaper in his native Orihuela (Alicante). This would only be the beginning of a prolific career where he would write about nature, love, life, death and his political commitment. And Miguel Hernández fought voluntarily on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Throughout his career Miguel Hernández has left short poems well known to everyone.
Miguel Hernández: a life made into a poem
Sometimes it happens that life surpasses fiction and, in the case of Miguel Hernández, tragedy stalked him like a hunter stalks his prey. Unfortunately, he was never able to avoid it and this is reflected in multiple poems.
Is there anything worse for a parent than losing their child? Miguel Hernández and his great loveto whom he would dedicate a large number of poems, Josefina, lost their first child when he was only 10 months old. About this he wrote in his poems Clothes with their smell either Black black eyes. A few months later, what would be her second child would be born and to whom he would dedicate one of his best-known poems: Lullabies from an onion. At that time, Miguel Hernández was in prison, for having fought against the national side and being affiliated with the communist party, and he knew that the basis of his wife and son’s diet were onions.
This inability to support his family caused him great pain that he would reflect in his poems. However, this would not be his only hardship, since not being compatible with the ideas of the regime that governed at that time led him to the worst of endings.
WAR POEMS BY MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ
Writing about one’s own experiences is common. Miguel Hernández was no exception and in his poems you can learn about his dreams, his desires and also his hardships. Of course, an experience as shocking as war could not fail to manifest itself in his writings. sad wars, I call to the youth either Sitting on the dead They are some of his most famous poems.
Not only would he write poems from the trenches, but he would also do so from prisonsince when the national side wins it orders his capture. Given this victory, Miguel Hernández manages to flee to Portugal, but the Portuguese law enforcement forces hand him over to the Spanish Civil Guard. This would be his end. After his return to Spain he would only know different prisons, eventually dying in Alicante due to tuberculosis.
Miguel Hernández is one of the great poets of Spanish literature, which is why it is necessary to continue keeping his memory alive. To do this, we have made a compilation of thehe 22 best poems by Miguel Hernández.
1. Sad wars (poem by Miguel Hernández)
sad wars
If the company is not love
sad, sad
sad weapons
if it’s not the words
sad, sad
sad men
if they don’t die of love
sad, sad
2. I wrote in the sand (Poem by Miguel Hernández)
I wrote in the sand
the three names of life:
life, death, love.
A gust of sea,
so many clear times gone,
He came and erased them.
3. The mouth (poem by Miguel Hernández)
Mouth that drags my mouth:
mouth that you have dragged me:
mouth that comes from afar
to illuminate me with rays.
Dawn that you give to my nights
a red and white glow.
Mouth full of mouths:
bird full of birds.
Song that returns the wings
up and down.
Death reduced to kisses,
thirsty to die slowly,
you give to the bleeding grass
two flashes of wings.
The lip above the sky
and the earth the other lip.
Kiss that rolls in the shadow:
kiss that comes rolling
from the first cemetery
until the last stars.
Astro that has your mouth
muted and closed
until a celestial touch
It makes your eyelids vibrate.
Kiss that goes to a future
of girls and boys,
that will not leave deserts
neither the streets nor the fields.
How many buried mouths,
without a mouth, we dig up!
Kiss on your mouth for them,
I toast in your mouth to so many
that fell on the wine
of the loving vessels.
Today they are memories, memories,
distant and bitter kisses.
I sink my life in your mouth,
I hear rumors of spaces,
and infinity seems
that has turned on me.
I have to kiss you again,
I have to return, I sink, I fall,
as the centuries descend
towards the deep ravines
like a feverish snowfall
of kisses and lovers.
Mouth that you unearthed
the clearest dawn
with your tongue. three words,
three fires you have inherited:
life, death, love. There they remain
written on your lips…
4. He didn’t want to be (poem by Miguel Hernández)
He did not know the meeting
of the man and the woman.
The loving hair
could not flourish.
He stopped his senses
refusing to know
and they descended transparently
before dawn.
He saw his morning cloudy
and he stayed in his yesterday.
He didn’t want to be.
5. For freedom (poem by Miguel Hernández)
For freedom I bleed, I fight, I live.
For freedom, my eyes and my hands,
like a carnal tree, generous and captive,
I give to surgeons.
For freedom I feel more hearts
What sands in my chest: my veins foam,
and I enter the hospitals, and I enter the cottons
as in lilies.
For freedom I take bullets
of those who have rolled his statue in the mud.
And I get rid of my feet, my arms,
from my house, from everything.
Because where empty basins dawn,
she will put two stones of future look
and will make new arms and new legs grow
in the cut meat.
Winged sap will sprout without autumn
relics of my body that I lose in each wound.
For I am like the felled tree, which sprouts:
because I still have life.
6. I call to the youth (poem by Miguel Hernández)
The fifteen and the eighteen,
eighteen and twenty…
I’m going to get older
to the fire that requires me,
and if my hour resonates
before twelve months,
I will fulfill them underground.
I try to make sure that they remain of me
a memory of sunshine
and a brave sound.
If every mouth in Spain,
of his youth, put
these words, biting them,
in the best of his teeth:
If the youth of Spain,
of a single and green impulse,
raise his gallantry,
his muscles extended
against the riotous
They want to take over Spain,
it would be the sea throwing
to the silent sand always
several horses from manure
of its transparent towns,
with an endless arm
of perpetual strong foam.
If El Cid nailed again
those bones that still hurt
dust and thought,
that hill in front of you,
that thunder of his soul
and that indelible sword,
without rival, over his shadow
of intertwined laurels:
when looking at what about Spain
The Germans claim,
the Italians try,
the Moors, the Portuguese,
that have been engraved in our sky
cruel constellations
of crimes soaked
in innocent blood,
climbed on his angry colt
and in his celestial anger
to shoot down trimotors
like someone who demolishes crops.
Under a paw of rain,
and a bunch of relent,
and an army of sun,
rebel bodies march
of the worthy Spaniards
who do not submit to the yoke,
and the clarity follows them,
and the oaks refer to them.
Among serious orderlies
there are wounded people who die
with face surrounded
of such diaphanous sunsets,
that are sown auroras
around his temples.
They look like sleeping silver
and gold at rest they seem.
They reached the trenches
and they said firmly:
here we will take root
before anyone kicks us out!
and death was felt
proud to have them.
But in the black corners,
in the blackest ones, they tend
to cry for the fallen
mothers who gave them milk,
sisters who washed them,
brides who have been snow
and they have turned into mourning
and that they have returned from fever;
bewildered widows,
scattered women,
letters and photographs
who express them faithfully,
where the eyes break
from seeing and not seeing them so much,
of so many silent tears,
of so much absent beauty.
Solar youth of Spain:
let time pass and stay
with a murmur of bones
heroic in their current.
Throw your bones into the field,
throw the strength you have
to the forest mountain ranges
and to the olive tree of oil.
It shines on the hills,
and turn off the bad people,
and dare with the lead,
and the shoulder and leg extend.
Blood that does not overflow,
youth that does not dare,
It is not blood, nor is it youth,
They neither shine nor bloom.
Bodies that are born defeated,
defeated and gray they die:
They come with the age of a century,
and they are old when they come.
Youth always pushes
youth always wins,
and the salvation of Spain
It depends on your youth.
Death next to the rifle,
before we are banished,
before we are spit on,
before we face
and before among the ashes
that of our people remain,
dragged without remedy
let us cry bitterly:
Oh Spain of my life,
Oh Spain of my death!
7. Aceituneros (poem by Miguel Hernández)
Andalusians of Jaén,
haughty olive growers,
tell me in my soul: who,
who raised the olive trees?
Nothing raised them,
neither the money, nor the lord,
but the silent land,
the work and the sweat.
United with pure water
and the planets united,
the three gave the beauty
of twisted trunks.
Arise, gray olive tree,
they said at the foot of the wind.
And the olive tree raised a hand
powerful foundation.
Andalusians of Jaén,
haughty olive growers,
tell me in my soul: who
did he nurse the olive trees?
Your blood, your life,
not that of the exploiter
that was enriched in the wound
generous of sweat.
Not the landowner’s
that buried you in poverty,
that trampled your forehead,
that reduced your heads.
Trees that your desire
dedicated to the center of the day
They were the beginning of a loaf
that only the other ate.
How many centuries of olives,
imprisoned feet and hands,
sun to sun and moon to moon,
They weigh on your bones!
Andalusians of Jaén,
haughty olive growers,
my soul asks: whose,
Whose olive trees are these?
Jaén, get up brave
on your moonstones,
don’t go to be a slave
with all your olive groves.
Within the clarity
of the oil and its aromas,
indicate your freedom
the freedom of your hills.
8. Waltz of those in love and united forever (Miguel Hernández)
They never came out
of the hug garden.
And before the red rosebush
of the kisses rolled.
Hurricanes wanted
with resentment separate them.
And the sharp axes
and the rigid rays.
They increased the land
of pale hands.
Precipices measured,
driven by the wind
between unmade mouths.
They toured shipwrecks,
ever deeper
in their bodies their arms.
Chased, sunk
for great helplessness
of memories and moons
of November and March,
they were blown away
as light powder:
they were blown away,
but always hugged.
9. Everything is full of you (poem by Miguel Hernández)
Everything is full of you,
and all of me is full:
the cities are full,
just like cemeteries
of you, for all the houses,
of me, for all bodies.
Through the streets I leave
something I’m picking up:
pieces of my life
come from very far away.
I go winged to the agony,
crawling I see myself
on the threshold, in the background
latent from birth.
Everything is full of me:
of something that is yours and I remember
lost but found
sometime, some time.
Time left behind
decidedly black,
indelibly red,
gold on your body.
Everything is full of you,
pierced from your hair:
of something that I have not achieved
and that I search among your bones.