Song to Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1968 · Authors: Pedro García Cabrera

Pedro García Cabrera (Vallehermoso, La Gomera, 19 August 1905 - Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 20 March 1981), is one of the fundamental voices of Canarian poetry of all time. His first book, Líquenes , appeared in 1928 and he was a co-founder of Cartones and Gaceta de Arte , two of the main avant-garde Canarian magazines. His book Transparencias fugadas (1934) marked his incorporation into the surrealist movement. Political commitment led the poet to join the PSOE, being elected councillor of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council in 1931. After the military uprising of 1936, García Cabrera was arrested, imprisoned and deported to Africa, but his poetic production continued to grow and he resumed publishing from the 1950s onwards.

His book Vuelta a la isla , from 1968, contains 37 ballads and two compositions with different rhythms. The poems outside the ballad metre and at the beginning of the work, Nana de una isla and Canto a Santa Cruz , are dedicated to the island of Tenerife and the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, respectively. The latter reads as follows:

 «Grant me the honour of sponsoring you,

city through whose streets has beat

the nightingale of the blood in my veins;

city that rises with your face

turned to the freedom of the horizon;

city that has tied a knot of your tears

upon seeing your wings of distance and flight

reduced to swans of a pond.

From the sea comes your birth and cradle.

You were born already dark with volcanoes,

almost with the nakedness of stone and sky,

rower of your arms and your brow,

with your legs sunk in the water

equal to a fisher girl.

The sea was your nurse, with its breasts

of foam and solitude, with its backs

of music and seagull, with its shoulders

of undulating wheatfield and with its belly

round with adventure and remoteness.

You have grown little by little,

working yourself to the rhythm of the waves,

with a summit’s pain in your gaze

and a yawl asleep in your smile,

thinking of yourself as trees and nests

through the meditations of your squares

and harbouring in your mollusc shell

a murmuring bee’s heart.

I love you because you come from below,

from barefoot sands, and you do not hide

your work as a sea worker;

I love you because you have made for yourself

your house and your song; because your men,

at the height of the roads,

do not put a border on what has

contour, and lucidity, and a soul of snow;

I love you because in the midst of the waters

you kiss in peace the heart of the world

and carry it tied in memory;

because you still have on your cheeks

fresh love and warm the morning

of the friendship of the air and the palm trees;

because you know how to suffer and never forget

that hatred is a thorn a hundred leagues long

where the rose cannot dawn

that breathes deep in your chest.

You do not come from yesterday, you arrive from now,

from the brightness of the instant that pierces

your side open to joy.

And you give yourself and you hold yourself, transmitting yourself

in the accordion of the surf,

that goes with your voice and returns,

with its alliance of affections and destinies,

over the blue enamoured foam.

You have come this far, faultless city,

sea lookout, biting the ripe fruit

of mermaids and endeavours

in the silence of your own hands.

You, carpenters, continue it

with the woods of high dreams;

you, bricklayers, continue it

with stones as hard as your lives

and you, maidens, make it bloom,

give it virginity of forest and rain,

give it your ears of clear eyes,

give it your illusion of being happy.»

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