Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, also had a penchant for politics. Besides his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, he has also written a lot of resistance poetry.

Here I am sharing his poem “Dictator” –

An odor has remained among the sugarcane:
 a mixture of blood and body, a penetrating
 petal that brings nausea.

 Between the coconut palms the graves are full
 of ruined bones, of speechless death-rattles.
 The delicate dictator is talking
 with top hats, gold braid, and collars.

 The tiny palace gleams like a watch
 and the rapid laughs with gloves on
 cross the corridors at times
 and join the dead voices
 and the blue mouths freshly buried.

 The weeping cannot be seen, like a plant
 whose seeds fall endlessly on the earth,
 whose large blind leaves grow even without light.

 Hatred has grown scale on scale,
 blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp,
 with a snout full of ooze and silence