20 Poems of Love and a Song of DespairPablo Neruda

For NatalieTe Quiero

Poem 1

Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs

You face the world with your attitude of surrender.

My wild farmer’s body digs into you,

And makes your son leap from the depths of the Earth

I was alone like a tunnel; the birds fled from me,

And the night covered me with her savage invasion.

To survive, I forged you like a weapon.

Like an arrow in my bow, like a rock in my sling.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.

Body of skin, of moss, of milk, avid and firm.

Oh the glass of your bosom, those absent eyes!

Oh the roses of your pelvis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace,

My thirst, my sorrow without limit, my undecided path!

Dark river-beds where eternal thirst flows, and fatigue flows, and infinite pain.

Poem 2

The light envelops you in your mortal call.

Absorbed, pale-suffering, thus placed

Against the aged spirals of dusk

that revolve around you.

Speechless, my friend,

Only in the solitude of this hour of the dead

And full of those lives on fire,

Pure heiress of the destroyed day.

A bunch of sunlight falls on your darkened dress

In the night the great roots

Grow suddenly from your soul

Those things hidden in you turn out,

In the manner of all people, pale and blue,

Your own new born, feed themselves.

Oh slave, great, fruitful and magnetic;

Who circulates in black, finds success in gold,

Raised, trying, achieving a creation so alive

That the flowers succumb to the wholeness of its sorrow.

Poem 3

Oh vastness of pines, mumble of breaking waves,

Slow light-show, a solitary bell,

The twilight falling in your eyes, doll-like,

Landed shell, in you the earth sings!

In you the rivers sing and my soul escapes

Just as you desire and to where you will.

I aim my path at your bow of hope,

And my flock of arrows will jump in delirium.

Around me I see your waist of clouds,

And your silence harasses my persecuted hours.

It is you with the arms of transparent stone,

Where my kisses anchor and my wet anxiety nests

Oh your mysterious voice, coloured and deepened by love,

In the resonant, dying afternoon.

Thus in long hours over the fields I have seen

Those ears bowing to the mouth of the wind.

Poem 4

It is a morning filled with storm,

In the heart of summer

As white goodbye-handkerchiefs journey the clouds

The wind shakes them with his travelling hands

Innumerable heart of wind

Beating above our enamoured silence.

Buzzing among the trees, orchestral and divine

Like a language full of wars and songs

Wind that carries in quick theft the fallen leaves

And divides the beating arrow of the birds

Wind that topples her with a foamless wave

substance without measure, the inclining fire.

Then her weight of kisses breaks, immerses;

Struggling through the door from the wind of summer

Poem 5

As you hear me,

My words

Seem to thin at times

Like the traces of gulls at the beaches.

A necklace, a drunken bell

For your hands as soft as grapes

And my words seem distant from me

More yours than mine, they climb

My aged pain like ivy

They climb through the wet walls

And you are responsible for this blood sport

They are fleeing from my darkened lair

You are full of everything, full of everything.

Right before you they populate the solitude that you occupy,

They are, after all, accustomed more to my sorrow than you.

Now I want them to say what I want to say to you

As you hear them, thus I want you to hear me.

The wind of anguish still often pulls them,

Hurricanes of dreams still sometimes trip them

You hear other voices in my pained voice,

Crying from old mouths, the blood of old pleas

Love me, my companion. Do not abandon me.

Stay with me, stay with me, companion in this wave of anguish.

But my words are stained with your love.

You occupy everything, you occupy everything.

I’ll make everything an endless necklace

for your hands, soft as grapes.

Poem 6

I remember you as you were last autumn

Yours was the grey beret and the still heart

In your eyes fought the calls of the dusk,

And the leaves fell in the waters of your soul.

Attached to my hands like a climbing plant.

The leaves collected in your slow and calm voice

A bonfire of amazement in which my thirst burnt.

Sweet blue hyacinth bent about my soul.

I feel travelling in your eyes that the autumn is distant

Grey beret, voice of a bird and the heart of home,

There towards left my deep longings

And fell my happy kisses like embers

Sky from a ship, country from the hill-tops,

I remember your light, your smoke, from a lake of calm!

There burns even more the dusk in your eyes .

Dry leaves of autumn twirl in your soul.

Poem 7

Leaning into the evenings I throw my sad nets

into your oceanic eyes

Over there, stretching and burning in the tallest bonfire,

my solitude, waving it’s arms like

a cast-away.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes,

That anoint, like the sea, the beacon’s breeze.

You keep only obscurity, my distant female

From your image emerges the frightful shore.

Leaning into the evenings I throw my sad nets

upon the sea that beats over your oceanic eyes

The night birds peck the first stars

that flash like my soul now that I am in love with you.

The night gallops its dark mare,

scattering blue spikes about the land.

Poem 8

Oh white bee, buzzing – drunk off the honey of my soul

You twist in slow spirals of smoke

I am he without hope, the word without echoes

The word which has everything and which had everything.

My last line, my last anxiety rustles in you

In my desert-earth you are the last rose.

Oh silence

Close your deep eyes. There the night flaps its wings.

Oh strip your body from this shy figure.

You have deep eyes where the night fuses.

Fresh arms of flowers, and your lap, a rose.

Your bosom appears like two white shells

A dark butterfly has gone to sleep on your stomach.

Oh Silence

I have here the solitude from which you are absent.

It is raining. The wind of the sea hunts

errant seagulls.

The water goes barefoot through the wet streets,

From this tree the leaves complain like the ill.

White bee, absent, still buzzing in my soul.

You revive in time, slender and silent.

Oh silence

Poem 9

Drunk like turpentine from long kisses,

Summerish, I lead a boat of roses

bending toward the death of the slender day.

Cemented in the sound naval frenzy.

Pale and sparse to me I cross

The devouring waters amidst the bitter odour of the discovered peak.

Still clothed in grey and bitter sounds and

A sad summit of abandoned foam.

I go, strengthened by passion, mounted on my only wave,

Night and day, hot and cold, at once,

asleep in the gorge of those fortunate

white isles, sweet like fresh hips.

In the moistening night, my vest of kisses trembles

Charged madly like an electric current,

Heroically dividing into dreams,

Intoxicating roses practice upon me.

Waters arrive in the middle of the outside waves,

Your parallel body is subjected to my hands

Like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul

Quick and slow in the sub-celestial energy.

Poem 10

We have lost even the night.

No one sees us this evening with hands together

While the blue night falls over the world.

I have seen from my window

The fiesta of the west in the distant hilltops.

Sometimes, like a coin,

A piece of sun is lit between my hands.

I remember you with my soul clenched

By the sadness through which you have known me.

Then, where were you?

Between the genes

Saying what words?

Why does love come suddenly to me

When I feel sad, and I feel you far away?

The book fell that is always taken down in the twilight hours,

And, like a wounded dog, my cape fell to my feet.

Always, always, you walk away in the evenings,

to where the night rushes, erasing statues.

Poem 11

Almost outside of heaven, anchored between two mountains,

Is the level of the moon.

Turning, errant night, the digger of eyes,

Let’s see the how many stars are fragmented by this small pond.

It makes a mournful cross across my brow, and flees.

Forge of blue metals, nights of silent struggles,

My heart turns round like a crazed flywheel.

Girl coming from so far away, brought from so far away

Sometimes your image shines out from under heaven.

Moan, tempest, whirlpool of fury,

You cross over my heart without stopping.

The wind of the graves carries, destroys,

disperses your sleeping roots.

It uproots the great trees to its other side,

But, you, clear girl, question of smoke, ear of corn,

Were formed of the wind’s luminous leaves,

Behind the night-mountains, the white iris of fire,

Of which I can say nothing, from where all things are made.

The sorrow that you left cutting my chest to pieces,

it is now time to follow another path,

where sorrow doesn’t smile.

Storm that buried the bells, clouded flutter of torments

As I touch it now, I sadden it.

Oh, to follow the path that leads away from everything,

not intercepted by sorrow, death, the autumn,

with your eyes open among the dew.

Poem 12

Your breast is enough for my chest

Your freedom enough for my wings,

From my mouth comes ‘til heaven

What was sleeping above your soul.

In you is the hope of each day.

You arrive like the dew to the petal.

You weaken the horizon by your absence.

Eternally in flight like the waves.

I have said that you sung in the wind

Like the pines and like the masts.

Like them, you are long, taciturn,

And sad all at once, like a journey.

Welcoming like an old path

Echoes and voices of old are populated in you

I awake, and the birds that sleep

In your soul flee, migrating.

Poem 13

I have been marked with crosses of fire

The white atlas of your body.

My mouth was a spider crossing, hiding itself.

In you; away from you, timorous, thirsty.

The stories I told you on the bank of the evening,

doll sad and sweet, were so you would not be sad.

A swan, a tree, something far off and happy

That time about the grapes, that ripe and fruitful time.

I who live on a port from which I loved you

The loneliness crossed with dream and with silence.

At bay between the sea and sorrow.

Warm, delirious, between two immobile gondoliers.

Between those lips and that voice, something will die.

Something with the wings of a bird, something sorrowful and forgotten,

The way nets don’t retain water.

My dear, only drops remain, trembling.

Even so, something rings among these fugitive words.

Something sings, something rises into my avid mouth.

Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of my joy,

To sing, to burn, to flee, like a bell-tower in the hands of a madman.

My sad tenderness, what comes over you all at once?

When I have arrived at the most audacious and cold summit

My heart will close like a night flower.

Poem 14

You play every day with the light of the universe,

Subtle visitor, you come in the flowers and in the water.

You are more that this little white head that I clench

like a bunch between my hands each day.

You are like nobody, in that I love you.

Let me lay you among the golden garlands;

Who would write your name with letters of smoke among the stars of the south?

Oh leave me to remember you as you were when you still did not exist.

Suddenly the wind howls and strikes my window closed

Heaven is a net full of dark fishes.

Here all the wind will come to give way, all.

The rain undresses.

The birds pass, fleeing.

The wind, the wind.

I can only struggle with the force of men,

The storm swirls the darkened leaves

And releases all the ships that last night tied up to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not flee.

You will answer me until my final cry.

Cling to my sides as if you were afraid,

Even so, sometimes a strange shadow runs through your eyes.

Now, even now, my little one, you bring me honey-suckles, your perfumed bosom.

While the sad wind gallops killing butterflies,

I love you, and my joy bites the plum that is your mouth.

How much it will have hurt you getting accustomed to me,

To my single savage soul, to my name that sends them all away.

We have seen so many times the morning star burning, kissing our eyes

And above our heads winds the twilight in twirling fans.

My words rain about you, caressing you.

A long time I have loved your body of sunned pearl,

Until I believe you queen of this universe.

I will bring you the happy mountain flowers, Blue-bells,

Dark hazelnuts, a forest banquet of kisses.

I want to do with you

What the spring does with the cherries.

Poem 15

I like it when you are still, as it is like you are not there

And hear me from far away, and my voice doesn’t touch you.

It seems like your eyes have gone astray

And like a kiss has closed your mouth.

As all things are filled by my soul,

You emerge from all things, full of my soul.

Butterfly of a dream, you are like my soul,

And like the word “melancholy”.

I like it when you are still,

You are almost pleading, butterfly in a lullaby.

And you hear me from far away, and my voice doesn’t reach you.

Let me be still in your silence.

Let me speak to you also in your silence,

clear like a lamp, simple like a ring.

You are like the night, silent and starred.

Your silence is like the star, so far off and candid.

I like it when you are still, as it is like are not there

Distant and painful as if you had died.

A word then, a smile is enough.

And I am happy, happy that it’s not true.

Poem 16

(a paraphrase of Rabindranath Tagore)

In my sky upon twilight you are like a cloud

Your colour and form are as I want

You are mine, you are mine, woman of soft lips

My infinite hopes live in your life.

The lamp of my soul dyes your feet

My sour wine is sweeter in your lips,

Oh reaper of my evening song,

How these solitary dreams feel you to be mine!

You are mine, you are mine, I’ll cry in the breeze

Of the afternoon, the wind arresting my widowed voice.

Huntress of the depths of my eyes, your plunder

stills your nightly gaze like water.

In the net of my music, you are prey, my love,

And my nets of music are wide like heaven.

My soul is born on the beachhead of your mournful eyes

In your mournful eyes begins the land of dreams.

Poem 17

Thinking, I am threading the shadows in the deep solitude

You, also, are far away; oh, farther away than anybody.

Thinking, freeing birds, fading images, burying lamps,

bell-tower of mist, how distant there above!

Drowning sorrows, grinding shaded hopes, morose miller,

Night falls down flat on your face, far from the city.

Your presence is an other, strange to me like a thing.

I think at length of my life before you.

My life before anyone, my rough life.

The cry against the sea, among the stones.

Running free, crazy, in the breath of the sea.

The sad fury, the cry, the solitude of the sea.

Loose, violent, stretching towards the sky.

You, woman, who were there; what line, what spoke

of that immense fan? You were far off, as now.

A fire in the forest! Burning in blue crosses.

Burning, burning, flaring, sparking in trees of light

You burn out, crackles. Fire. Fire.

And my soul dances wounded from the curls of fire.

Who calls? What silence populates echoes?

The hour of nostalgia, hour of joy, hour of solitude.

My hour among all!

Horn in which the wind passes singing.

Such is the sorrowful passion knotted to my body.

Stripped of all roots

The assault of all waves!

Rolling, happy, sad, endlessly, my soul.

Thinking, burying lamps in the deep solitude.

Who are you, who are you?

Poem 18

Here I love you

In the shaded pines the wind unravels.

The night becomes phosphorous over the vagrant waters

Days go, all the same, chasing each other.

The cloud unfurls in dancing figures

A silver gull pulls itself away from sunset.

Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.

Oh the black cross of a ship.

Alone.

Sometimes I wake up, and my soul is wet.

Sounding, resounding, the distant sea.

This is a port.

Here I love you.

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

I love you still among these cold things.

Sometimes my kisses go in these grave ships,

That run through the sea to where they never arrive.

Now I see myself forgotten like these old anchors.

Sadder than the jetty when it docks in the evening.

My life tires itself in the needless hunger

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

My weariness struggles with the slow nights

But the night arrives and starts to sing to me.

The swirling moon makes a dream.

Your eyes seem to me like the greatest stars

And since I’ve loved you, the pines in the wind

Have wanted to sing your name with their leaves of wire

Poem 19

Girl, dark and lithe, the sun that makes the fruit,

curls the wheat, twists the algae

Makes your body happy, your eyes luminous,

And your mouth have the smile of water.

A black and longing sun is braided in the threads

of your black hair, when you stretch out your arms.

You play with the sun like a stream,

and it leaves you two shaded pools for eyes.

Girl, dark and lithe, nothing brings me close to you.

Everything takes me further from you, like noon.

You are the dizzying youth of a bee,

The intoxication of the waves, the force of the ear of corn.

My sombre heart searches for you, even as

I love your happy body, your voice, loose and delicate.

Butterfly, dark, sweet, final.

Like the corn-field and the sun, the poppy and the sea.

Poem 20

I can write the saddest verses tonight,

Writing, for example “the night is starry,

and the blue stars shiver, far away.”

The wind of the night revolves in the heavens and sings.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

I want her, and sometimes, she wants me.

On nights like this, I had her between my arms.

I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She wants me, and sometimes, I want her.

Like I have not loved those great purposeful eyes.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.

Thinking that I do not have her, feeling that I have lost her

Listening to the immense night, more immense without her.

And the verses fall upon my soul like the dew upon the grass.

What importance that my love could not keep her,

The night is starred and she is not with me.

That is all. far away, someone is singing. Far away.

My soul is not content speaking of having lost her.

My sight searches for her as to bring her closer.

My heart searches for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitens the same trees,

We, since then, now are not the same.

Now I do not want her, I am sure, but how much I wanted her.

My voice searches the wind to touch her ear.

Another. There will be another. Like before for my kisses.

Her voice, her clear body, her infinite eyes.

Now I do not want her, I am sure, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting so long.

Because on nights like this I had her between my arms.

My soul is not content with speaking of having lost her.

This would be the final pain she causes me.

And these would be the last verses that I write.

A Song of Despair

Memories of you emerge from the night that I am in.

The river ties to the sea his obstinate lament.

Abandoned like the jetties of day-break,

It is time to part, abandoned.

About my heart rain cold petals.

Oh pit of debris, ferocious cave of castaways

In you accumulated wars and flights,

From you rose the wings of song-birds.

You’ve swallowed everything, like distance.

Like the sea. Like time. All is sunk in you!

It was the happy hour of the assault and the kiss,

The hour of the stupor that burned like a light-house.

The fear of the forerunner, the fury of the man diving blind,

Clouded drunkenness of love, all is sunk in you!

In its infancy on a cloud,

My soul was winged and wounded,

Lost discoverer, all is sunk in you!

You bound yourself to pain, you clung to desire.

Sorrow felled you, all is sunk in you!

I made the wall of shadows recede,

And walked there from desire and the deed.

Oh flesh, my flesh, woman that I loved and lost.

In this humid hour, I recall and make song to you.

Like a glass you are housed in infinite tenderness,

And the infinite oblivion shattered you like a glass.

I was the black, the black solitude of islands,

And there, woman of love, your arms welcomed me.

I was the thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.

I was the mourning and the debris, and you were the miracle.

Oh woman, I don’t know how you could keep me

On the earth of your soul, on the cross of your arms.

My desire for you was most terrible and short,

The most unsettling and intoxicating, the most tense and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, still there is a fire in the graves,

Still the bunches burn when pecked by the birds.

Oh bitter mouth, oh kissed limbs,

Oh those hungry teeth, oh those twisted bodies.

Oh crazed sex of hope and effort,

in which we bind ourselves, and bring ourselves to despair.

And the tenderness, light like water and flour.

And the word just started in your lips.

This was my destiny, and in it travelled my longing.

And in it fell my longing, all is sunk in you!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,

What pain did you not express, what waves did not drown you.

From billow to billow you still blazed and sung

On foot, like a sailor on the bow of a ship.

Still you flowered in song, still you broke the currents.

Oh pit of debris, bottomless, bitter well.

Pale blind diver, hopeless stone thrower,

Lost discoverer, all is sunk in you.

It is the hour of parting, the hard, cold hour,

That the night sets on all timetables.

The loud belt-line of the sea girds the coast

Cold stars emerge, black birds migrating.

Abandoned like the jetties of day-break.

Only the tremulous shadow twists itself in my hands.

Oh farther than anything. Farther than anything.

It is time to leave. Abandoned.