Song to Honduras by Alfonso Guillén Zelaya
Homeland: I have felt myself wander in those winds
That descend from your lands carrying thoughts
Of sun. Like me, no one lives and concentrates you;
What is mine dwells in you, what is yours in me.
I have felt myself become the blood of your veins,
The foliage of your trees, the metal of your sands.
I love your scorching sun, your mighty downpours
And the transient dust that travels your paths.
I adore your spaces of murmuring crystal,
Your jungle fragrance and your silent indigenous.
Your seas troubled me, your mountains attracted me,
For them I have suffered a thirst for horizons
That has never been quenched, nor do I hope it to be.
Seas and mountains, a dual ladder to the stars
And wisdom:
In their waters and summits, the thinker and rebel
Find sovereignty, uniting your children and drowning your tyrants.
History does not tire and will break the yokes
That impostors and executioners have imposed upon your brow,
The horror of prisons and persecutions,
The uncertainty and the firing squads,
The bare feet and roofless life,
The sick blood and shattered lungs;
The pain of living every hope in ruins,
Ignorant, oppressed, without bread or medicine,
The impulse that annihilates your sorrows will intervene
And shatter the chains that bind you.
The tremendous night will be succeeded by the dawn.
Minute after minute, the redeeming forge
Relentlessly incinerates
The vile servility and cunning ambition
of minions and turncoats, fools and traitors.
In the dead ashes, flowers will burst forth,
Your empty fields will be filled with people,
And in exile and prisons, only criminals will remain
Against your worries, against your sleepless nights,
They will find a safer shelter than the roof of your skies
Or the sky and its huts, your peasants will have.
And rich in health. Owners of their plot of land,
As their children march to school
Their muscles and chests will be filled with faith.
They will believe that God exists, that justice is not a farce,
And their embrace and love. Brothers of the land,
They will grant us abundance and banish war.
Freedom will come. Democracy will come.
Not by foreign mandate or divine grace;
It will come because pain will unite us all
To sweep away poverty, oppressors, and mire.
Freedom will come! Over the inert past
We will see life defeating death.
We will have joy, we will have enthusiasm,
Fruitful activity will replace stagnation,
And across all paths that never sleep,
Your summits and pines will rise majestically.
The pine tree is your symbol. The pine tree is your flag;
It stands tall on your mountains, it stands tall on your slopes,
It stands tall on your plains, it stands tall on your hills;
Your blood and heroism, your dreams, your loves,
Throb in the warm sap of your pine forests
With the prophetic murmurs of ancient avatars
Like your own proud and defiant body,
Like the very history of your bleeding oppression,
The pine forest bears the marks of hatred and gunfire:
Your pine forests have been a battlefield.
There lie legions of wounded titans,
And their fallen branches lament to the wind;
The pine forest lacks bravery or soldiers:
Legendary pine forests, infinite pine forests,
An army of summits that offers itself to the outcasts.
In its compact block of fraternal arrogance,
A suspended lesson of struggle.
Noble pines of Honduras, mirrors of greatness,
Perpetual challenge of nature
Against divisions, against disloyalties,
Defeats, crimes, and adversities!
The pine is a horizon. The pine is an example.
In our lives, it possesses the majesty of a temple.
Honduran pine forests, ancestral pine forests,
Upright, eminent, serene, immortal;
Banner of victory against tyrannies;
Days of gold will come, new days will come!
