Because of you, in gardens of blossomingFlowers I ache from the perfumes of spring.I have forgotten your face, I no longerRemember your hands; how did your lipsFeel on mine? Because of you, I love the white statuesDrowsing in the parks, the white statues thatHave neither voice nor sight. I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;I have forgotten your eyes.Like a flower to its perfume, I am bound toMy vague memory of you. I live with painThat is like a wound; if you touch me, you willMake to me an irreperable harm. Your caresses enfold me, like climbingVines on melancholy…
Author: Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.
“You are here. Oh, you do not run away.You will answer me to the last cry.Curl round me as though you were frightened.Even so, a strange shadow once ran through your eyes. Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,and even your breasts smell of it.While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterfliesI love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth. How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,and over our heads the gray…
“I want you to knowone thing. You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now,if little by little you stop loving meI shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenlyyou forget medo not look for me,for I shall already have forgotten you.”
“The streetfilled with tomatoes,midday,summer,light ishalvedlikeatomato,its juicerunsthrough the streets. In December,unabated,the tomatoinvadesthe kitchen,it enters at lunchtime,takesits easeon countertops,among glasses,butter dishes,blue saltcellars. It shedsits own light,benign majesty.”