i've been reading blogs for the past half-hour and after everything, i'm glad i have been. nothing i can say will justify the following lines. how i wish i too could write something as moving. something so wonderful for the people who have touched my life. i place this here in the hopes that someone stumbling upon my blog might also be moved by the words of Pablo Neruda.
thank you hunter for sharing this in your blog.
"Tonight I Can Write" by Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example: "The night is shattered,and the blue stars shiver in the distance."
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I thought of the saddest lines.
And I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great, still eyes?
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance, someone is singing.
In the distance.My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me
suffer, and these the last verses that I write for her.
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THE COLLECTOR
On a wall in Neruda’s house, which hovers like a hawk
Above the town, is an embalmed, bright pink Venezuelan
Coro-coro. A black and white poem tells of the sky
Lit up by the scarlet feathers of the Caribbean.
In the trees beyond his window, where he wrote in green ink,
Sparrows play against a backdrop of multi-coloured roofs
And honeyed ocean blues. In his bar is a stuffed penguin;
A collection of beer mats. Another poem declares:
Amo las cosas locas
Locamente.
valparaiso 18.10.04
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