Some time ago, I think it was in 1993, I made a “Song for the Green March”, when together the Spanish agricultural organizations promoted a large meeting of farmers and ranchers in Madrid to demand their rights. At that time I wrote some verses, which I extract from my collections of poems to recover new life, on the occasion of the confrontations of rural people with the PAC in virtually all of Western Europe. Here goes, for your reading, a part of the song:
I will not be the one to discuss / about these people who arrive / from the fields, and the mountains, / from the valleys and sheepfolds.
I will not be the one who acts as a poet to exalt in a song, /or to express on high, /what I feel for the fields, /for the meadows, the hills and the tears.
They come from afar, in thousands, in streams, / from the parched shadows, / from the snowless mountain ranges, / from lost crops, / from the once murmuring plains, / from the most arid steppes if possible.
Hope has not been fulfilled: / they bring with them the dream of the durum wheat, / that does not season, / of the ears in upright times, / that now do not grain, / of the once fertile cattle, / that do not breed today, / of the lush orchards, / that the plagues mercilessly decimated.
There is no protecting sky./There is no Lord of the Harvests/who guarantees everything. /Every day, every month, you look up, /in search of the rain. /And you look below, /for the soft aroma of tempero.
You are the nostalgia / Of those verses of Fray Luis: / “Oh field, oh mountain, oh river! /… Wake me up the birds, /with their soft unlearned song… /From the mountain, to the slope, /by my hand planted /I have a garden. / … The air of the garden breathes, / and offers a thousand smells to the sense…»