To Roosevelt.
It is with the voice of the Bible, or the verse of Walt Whitman,
that one should reach you, Hunter!
primitive and modern, simple and complex,
with something of Washington and even more of Nimrod.
You are the United States,
you are the future invader of the naive America that has Indian blood,
that still prays to Jesus Christ and still speaks the Spanish tongue.
You are a proud and strong exemplar of your race;
you are cultured, you are skillful; you stand oppose to Tolstoy.
And taming horses, or slaying tigers,
you are an Alexander-Nebuchadnezzar.
(You are a professor of Energy
as today’s madmen say.)
You think that life is one big fire,
that progress is an eruption,
that the future lies wherever your bullet
Strikes.
No.
The United States are potent and great.
Whenever they shake there is a profound shudder
that passes through the enormous vertebrae of the Andes.
If you clamor, it is heard like the roaring of a lion.
Hugo already said to Grant: The stars are yours.
(As soonest the Argentinian son ascends, it shines,
and the Chilean star rises…) You are rich.
Joining the cult of Hercules to the cult of Mammon,
and illuminating the path to an easy conquest,
Liberty raises its torch in New York.
But our America, which has had poets
since the ancient times of Netzahualcoyotl,
which saved the footprints of the great Baco,
and learned the Panic alphabet at once;
Which has consulted the Astros, which knew Atlantis
whose name comes resonating to us from Plato,
that since the remote times of its life
has lived from light, from fire, from perfume, from love:
The America of the great Montezuma, of the Inca,
the fragrant America of Christopher Columbus,
the Catholic America, the Spanish America,
the America where once the noble Cuahtemoc said:
“I’m not in a bed of roses”; that America
that trembles from its hurricanes and lives from love,
men of Saxon eyes and barbarous soul, its alive.
And it dreams. And it loves, and it vibrates, and it is the sun’s daughter.
Be careful. Long live Spanish America!
There are a thousand cubs loosed from the Spanish lion.
It would be necessary, Roosevelt, for you to be God himself,
the-fearful Rifleman and the strong Hunter,
so that you can have us between your iron claws.
And, although you count on everything, you lack one thing: God!
.