Post Graduation Invite For A Farewell Party

Milk, mud and onion



In Orihuela, Alicante province, was born one day Miguel Hernandez, one of the most important poets of English literature and universal, while writing poetry was to be devoted to pasture goats, milking and selling milk in the doorways of the houses of their neighbors.

"Squat,
a goat milking and a dream."

In those years, the milk was sold in a few pots that some youngsters have never come to know and that others have almost forgotten, but whose We mention again bring back memories of some of the words that our grandfathers used to name objects that we did not know but which we learn their names even before knowing their profits, their shapes and sizes: the troughs for kneading bread, baskets hanging from the backs of mules, the wagons in which carrying hay, bowls and basins in which we washed the feet of the children, or to bring the milk dairy.

- What is a dairy, Grandma?
- The container in which the dairy milk brings home.
- The vessel is named by the lady?
- Yes
- Ah!

mean that the milk had to houses in the milk of dairy cows, sheep or goat, depending on the area. When it came to measuring wine, oil or milk capacity measures were not multiples of the liter, but were extraneous measures took their names from the same containers in which the liquids: milk, the pitcher, the barrel, the at sign, the quart, pint or bottle. The milk containers were of tin or copper and is imprinted with a mark of tin along the border to prevent this could be filed down and thus reduce their size and consumer fraud. These vessels carried a very fresh milk may be indigestible today skimmed our stomachs, but we drank all the time and sometimes we ate with a spoon when we were at home with rice milk or fried. Fresh milk consumed in the day and had to be boiled three times to separate the cream, which was available then, if your parents what Curran, butter.

Butter is obtained after beating the cream with a wooden spatula until it was loaded, and then had to keep beating and continue beating and continue beating. After beating both our mothers made butter cookies, cakes and pastry dough, prepared us for tea or slices of bread with butter, they were delicious, or with butter and sugar, or butter and chocolate milk, because then there were the calories as they do now, and if someone told us not we learned. Other days merendábamos urchin sandwich biscuits with butter, sometimes with jam, chocolate, quince paste with condensed milk or condensed milk. We also liked the bimbollos roasted ham or chorizo \u200b\u200bde Pamplona and buttered. If there was no bread with homemade butter oil merendábamos admitted many forms as it could do fried slices of bread or take it as is, in which case it was best to use the pick, remove the crumbs, fill the gap with oil and cover with the crumbs to make a kind of bun oil fraught with salt or sugar. Sometimes they gave us bread basted or Tulip Plants, which was not very far, but we had to resign because they said the ads of the time were very healthy product and very suitable for children. As healthy as sunflower oil, the Eko, solar water and quinine Santa Catalina. As healthy as milk Miguel Hernández milked the goats and then divided by the houses of the residents of Orihuela.

born Miguel in 1910 and died young of tuberculosis, although in reality it was a victim of the massacre that the scheme Franco continued to perform after the war ended to let things clear to everyone. In life acquired a certain prestige and Madrid came to alternate with some of the most famous poets of the time, but during his early youth was goatherd in Orihuela, an avid reader and good student. It was also mud, he told us:

"My name is mud but Miguel call me. Barro
is my profession and my destiny
Staining with his tongue as lame. "

In 1939, just 29 years old, enters a prison from which ever would no longer alive, and where, while waiting for the letters from wife, had time to write verses that might be the deepest and saddest of the twentieth century English poetry, the onion lullabies, nursery rhymes written in response to the plight in which his wife was alone, poor with a newborn son and eating only bread and onions. It onion

which Pablo Neruda dedicated an ode : "I celebrated that exists, onion, but to me you are more beautiful than a bird of dazzling feathers ..." , onions we eat mixed salad with lettuce and tomato, sprinkled with oil and sprinkled with a little salt, the onion fry along with potatoes to make or that we cooked tortilla filled with beautiful was also the protagonist of a lullaby filled with sadness, as if onions were always looking for reasons to make us mourn.

"But your blood sugar frosted
,
onion and hunger."

I knew the work of Miguel Hernández in 1972, the year Serrat released an album in which they played music to some of his poems. Years earlier had done the same with the verses of Antonio Machado, following the path set by Paco Ibáñez and other English singers who had taken up that appointment, I think Manuel Machado, said that poetry is born to be sung. Antonio Machado disc was an outstanding success but to me it has always seemed a bit uneven, as if the poet's verses and music on separate tracks and, on occasions, those subject, if not exceeded by this. I like the songs on the black disc of Miguel Hernández, because here the music seems to be more synchronized with the verses, to the extent that in some cases might give the impression that both were born simultaneously. In any case, the two poets achieved great popularity with musical versions Serrat. I once heard someone say that in Spain of those years could be considered a person was educated if he knew the works of Antonio Machado and Miguel Hernández before publication Serrat discs with his songs. If that is true I must admit that I was not very religious, partly my fault and partly because the education system from a regime that considered the poet of Orihuela as an enemy of Spain and therefore decided to condemn him to oblivion his work in silence.

I have not heard the album that collects the second installment of the musical versions Serrat has made the poems of Miguel Hernández. Therefore I refrain from saying anything about it, but I can comment, at least, that covers what I considered a gap in the first album, it includes a version of the poem that perhaps my favorite of all his work. This is a verse included in its "last Poems" and relate a present in shade and a bright future hope of inheriting his newborn son, the son of light and shadow. This poem I like playing well as a description of when the couple conceived their child in the midst of a darkness that prompts the body to be thrown on the blanket, on the moon and life, and interlock your bodies and mouths to kiss then raging. Given the thrust of the shadow is useless refuse, because:

"Moving is the sidereal forces shade, shadow
is tending her starry shade, turning
and making bridal couples.
You're the night, my wife. I am noon. "

We ask businessmen and politicians who are imaginative and speech vary from time to time, but instead we do not care that the poets we repeat over and over again the same story. The old story of love, tenderness, sexual impulse, emotion, fear, desire to survive, the need to protect children and to dream a better world for them. The same old story told by Miguel Hernandez in poignant verse, vibrant and fresh. And it is good for sensitive people like Joan Manuel Serrat, we come again to the work of a decent man who was able to write pages of extraordinary beauty in the midst of the terrible fact that he lived. Miguel Hernández. Milk, mud and onion. I find it impossible not to wonder that gives me his name. Miguel Hernández.

Blessed are you, a poet.