Some Neruda for you

“We met each other when we were young, before we knew enough about disappointment, and once we did we found we reminded each other of it.”

― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

Image : Michiel Huisman on Pinterest

Here I love you.

In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.

The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.

Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.

A silver gull slips down from the west.

Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.

Alone.

Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.

Far away the sea sounds and resounds.

This is a port.

Here I love you.

Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.

I love you still among these cold things.

Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels

that cross the sea towards no arrival.

I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.

My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.

I love what I do not have. You are so far.

My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.

But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.

And as I love you, the pines in the wind

want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

Pablo Neruda

The Book of Questions III

Image: Tumblr

Tell me, is the rose naked

 or is that her only dress?

 Why do trees conceal

 the splendor of their roots?

 Who hears the regrets

 of the thieving automobile? 

Is there anything in the world sadder

 than a train standing in the rain?

Pablo Neruda

Poetry

Dedicated to Roland  . . . .  because it sparkles and glows

Painting: Starry night by Vincent van Gogh

And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, not silence,

but from a street it called me,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among raging fires

or returning alone,

there it was, without a face,

and it touched me.

I didn't know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names,

my eyes were blind.

Something knocked in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire,

and I wrote the first, faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing;

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

the darkness perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire, and flowers,

the overpowering night, the universe.

And I, tiny being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

felt myself a pure part

of the abyss.

I wheeled with the stars.

My heart broke loose with the wind.

Pablo Neruda 

(1904—1973)

Sonnet

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul. 

I love you as the plant that never blooms

 but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

 thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

 risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

 I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

 I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

 so I love you because I know no other way

 than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

 so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

 so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda

Lives - Pablo Neruda

Lives

Ah how ill at ease sometimes

I feel you are

with me, victor among men!

Because you do not know

that with me were victorious

thousand of faces that you can not see,

thousands of feet and hearts that marched with me,

that I am not,

that I do not exist,

that I am only the front of those who go with me,

that I am stronger

because I bear in me

not my little life

but all the lives,

and I walk steadily forward

because I have a thousand eyes,

I strike with the weight of a rock

because I have a thousand hands

and my voice is heard on the shores

of all the lands

because it is the voice of all

those who did not speak,

of those who did not sing

and who sing today with this mouth

that kisses you.

© Pablo Neruda (uit: The Captain’s Verses, vertaal deur Dondald D. Walsh)

I crave your mouth - Pablo Neruda

Image: "The hug" by Nan Goldin

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair,
Silent, starving I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disquiets me,
I search the liquid sound of your steps all day.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
For your hands the color of the wild grain,
I 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 loveliness,
The nose, sovereign of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

And I walk hungry, smelling the twilight
Looking for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barren wilderness.


Pablo Neruda

The saddest night - Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
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, 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 starry 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 tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
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. As she was before my kisses.
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.