Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name after Czech poet Jan Neruda.
Neruda wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."[1] Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope
"WIKIPEDIA"
Neruda wrote in a variety of styles including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, and erotically-charged love poems such as the ones in his 1924 collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."[1] Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was his personal color of hope
"WIKIPEDIA"
Link to other poems
Ode to a Large Tuna in the MarketAmong the market greens, a bullet from the ocean depths, a swimming projectile, I saw you, dead. All around you were lettuces, sea foam of the earth, carrots, grapes, but of the ocean truth, of the unknown, of the unfathomable shadow, the depths of the sea, the abyss, only you had survived, a pitch-black, varnished witness to deepest night. Only you, well-aimed dark bullet from the abyss, mangled at one tip, but constantly reborn, at anchor in the current, winged fins windmilling in the swift flight of the marine shadow, a mourning arrow, dart of the sea, olive, oily fish. I saw you dead, a deceased king of my own ocean, green assault, silver submarine fir, seed of seaquakes, now only dead remains, yet in all the market yours was the only purposeful form amid the bewildering rout of nature; amid the fragile greens you were a solitary ship, armed among the vegetables fin and prow black and oiled, as if you were still the vessel of the wind, the one and only pure ocean machine: unflawed, navigating the waters of death. My Dog has Died My dog has died. I buried him in the garden next to a rusted old machine. Some day I'll join him right there, but now he's gone with his shaggy coat, his bad manners and his cold nose, and I, the materialist, who never believed in any promised heaven in the sky for any human being, I believe in a heaven I'll never enter. Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom where my dog waits for my arrival waving his fan-like tail in friendship. Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth, of having lost a companion who was never servile. His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine withholding its authority, was the friendship of a star, aloof, with no more intimacy than was called for, with no exaggerations: he never climbed all over my clothes filling me full of his hair or his mange, he never rubbed up against my knee like other dogs obsessed with sex. No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he'd keep on gazing at me with a look that reserved for me alone all his sweet and shaggy life, always near me, never troubling me, and asking nothing. Ai, how many times have I envied his tail as we walked together on the shores of the sea in the lonely winter of Isla Negra where the wintering birds filled the sky and my hairy dog was jumping about full of the voltage of the sea's movement: my wandering dog, sniffing away with his golden tail held high, face to face with the ocean's spray. Joyful, joyful, joyful, as only dogs know how to be happy with only the autonomy of their shameless spirit. There are no good-byes for my dog who has died, and we don't now and never did lie to each other. So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it. Ode To Wine Day-colored wine, night-colored wine, wine with purple feet or wine with topaz blood, wine, starry child of earth, wine, smooth as a golden sword, soft as lascivious velvet, wine, spiral-seashelled and full of wonder, amorous, marine; never has one goblet contained you, one song, one man, you are choral, gregarious, at the least, you must be shared. At times you feed on mortal memories; your wave carries us from tomb to tomb, stonecutter of icy sepulchers, and we weep transitory tears; your glorious spring dress is different, blood rises through the shoots, wind incites the day, nothing is left of your immutable soul. Wine stirs the spring, happiness bursts through the earth like a plant, walls crumble, and rocky cliffs, chasms close, as song is born. A jug of wine, and thou beside me in the wilderness, sang the ancient poet. Let the wine pitcher add to the kiss of love its own. My darling, suddenly the line of your hip becomes the brimming curve of the wine goblet, your breast is the grape cluster, your nipples are the grapes, the gleam of spirits lights your hair, and your navel is a chaste seal stamped on the vessel of your belly, your love an inexhaustible cascade of wine, light that illuminates my senses, the earthly splendor of life. But you are more than love, the fiery kiss, the heat of fire, more than the wine of life; you are the community of man, translucency, chorus of discipline, abundance of flowers. I like on the table, when we're speaking, the light of a bottle of intelligent wine. Drink it, and remember in every drop of gold, in every topaz glass, in every purple ladle, that autumn labored to fill the vessel with wine; and in the ritual of his office, let the simple man remember to think of the soil and of his duty, to propagate the canticle of the wine |
Ode to TomatoesThe street filled with tomatoes midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera, a cool sun, profound, inexhausible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is wed to the clear onion, and to celebrate the union we pour oil, essential child of the olive, onto its halved hemispheres, pepper adds its fragrance, salt, its magnetism; it is the wedding of the day, parsley hoists its flag, potatoes bubble vigorously, the aroma of the roast knocks at the door, it's time! come on! and, on the table, at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays its convolutions, its canals, its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns, the tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness. Ode to My Socks Mara Mori brought me a pair of socks which she knitted herself with her sheepherder's hands, two socks as soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if they were two cases knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin, Violent socks, my feet were two fish made of wool, two long sharks sea blue, shot through by one golden thread, two immense blackbirds, two cannons, my feet were honored in this way by these heavenly socks. They were so handsome for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that woven fire, of those glowing socks. Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation to save them somewhere as schoolboys keep fireflies, as learned men collect sacred texts, I resisted the mad impulse to put them in a golden cage and each day give them birdseed and pieces of pink melon. Like explorers in the jungle who hand over the very rare green deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stretched out my feet and pulled on the magnificent socks and then my shoes. The moral of my ode is this: beauty is twice beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a matter of two socks made of wool in winter. ODE TO LAZINESS Yesterday I felt that my ode wouldn't get up off the ground. It was time, it should at least show a green leaf. I scratched the earth: "Get up, sister ode" --I said to her-- "I promised to produce you, don't be scared of me, I'm not going to step on you, ode with four leaves, ode for four hands, you'll have tea with me. Get up, I will crown you among the odes, we'll go out to the sea shore on our bicycles." Nothing doing. Then, high up in the pines, laziness appeared naked, she led me off dazzled and sleepy, she showed me on the sand little broken pieces of material from the ocean, wood, seaweed, stones feathers of seabirds. I looked for yellow agates but didn't find any. The sea filled all spaces, crumbling towers, invading the coasts of my country, pushing forward successive catastrophes of foam. Alone on the sand a ray opened a ring of fire. I saw the silvered petrels cruise and like black crosses the cormorants nailed to the rocks. I set free a bee writhing in a spiderweb, I put a little stone in my pocket, it was smooth, very smooth like a birds' breast, meanwhile on the cost, all afternoon, sun and of wrestled. Sometimes the fog was pregnant with light like a topaz, at other times a moist ray of sun fell, and yellow drops fell after it. At night, thinking about the duties of my fugitive ode, I took off my shoes by the fire, sand spilled from them and right away I was falling asleep. ~ |