The United Fruit Company

The United Fruit Company

after Neruda

When the trumpet had sounded, all was
prepared on the earth,
and Jehovah parceled out the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporate entities:
The United Fruit Company Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest
piece, the central coast of my land,
the sweet waistline of America.
It rebaptized its countries
“Banana Republics,”
and over the sleeping dead,
over the disquieted heroes

who had secured their greatness,
their liberty and flags,
it established the opera buffa:
it disposed of free will,
awarded the crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, won
the dictatorship of the flies,
flies of Trujillo, flies of Tachos,
flies of Carias, flies of Martinez,
flies of Ubico, all of them flies sticky
with submissive blood and marmalade,
drunken flies buzzing
over the graves of the people,
circus flies, sharp flies
proficient in tyranny.

Among the bloodthirsty flies,
the Fruit Company disembarks,
shoving all the coffee and fruit
onto ships that glide away
like trays laden with the treasures
of our drowning dominions.

And all the while, all through
the sugared pits of the seaports,
the Indians were falling entombed
in the morning mist:
a corpse rolls, a thing
without a name, a discarded number,
a cluster of dead fruit
pulled down onto the garbage heap.