Here are some poems from one of the world's greatest poet, Pablo
Neruda. Enjoy!!
Ode to the Book
translated
by Nathaniel Tarn
When I close a
book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper
ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the
islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the
thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to
its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a
guitar.
The ocean's surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and
Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio--
I got a telegram
from the "Mine"
Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won't let out)
expects me in
Bucalemu.
No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me
up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind
my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of
my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain
firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth
or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous
wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I
won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my
poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed
on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my
way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their
shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from
life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one
anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among
men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my
song.
Love Sonnet XI
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and
starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn
disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage
harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat
your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose
of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your
hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
A Song of Despair
translated by
w.s.merwin
The memory of you emerges from the night around
me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like
the dwarves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted
one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris,
fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights
accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed
everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything
sank!
It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the
spell that blazed like a lighthouse.
Pilot's dread, fury of blind
driver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!
In the
childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you
everything sank!
You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness
stunned you, in you everything sank!
I made the wall of shadow draw
back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.
Oh flesh, my own flesh,
woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song
to you.
Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness.
and the infinite
oblivion shattered you like a jar.
There was the black solitude of the
islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.
There was
thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and ruins, and
you were the miracle.
Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain
me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!
How terrible
and brief my desire was to you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and
avid.
Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the
fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.
Oh the bitten mouth, oh the
kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.
Oh the
mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.
And
the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on
the lips.
This was my destiny and in it was my voyage of my
longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!
Oh pit of
debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what
sorrow are you not
drowned!
From billow to billow you still called and
sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.
You still
flowered in songs, you still brike the currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and
bitter well.
Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in
you everything sank!
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold
hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
The rustling belt
of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds
migrate.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only tremulous shadow
twists in my hands.
Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than
everything.
It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one!
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