Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Nerudawas the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto. He derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda. Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth12 July 1904
CityParral, Chile
CountryChile
blood darkness
The darkness of a day elapsed, of a day nourished with our sad blood.
stars love-you night
The birds of night peck at the first stars that flash like my soul when I love you.
wind cities glasses
Between lips and lips there are cities of great ash and moist summit, drops of when and how, vague comings and goings: between lips and lips as along a shore of sand and glass the wind passes.
rain rivers water
The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue; its silence....
lost-love love-is long
Love is short, but forgetting is long.
memories eye kissing
Each in the most hidden sack kept the lost jewels of memory, intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses, the fragment of public or private happiness. A few, the wolves, collected thighs, other men loved the dawn scratching mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers. For me happiness was to share singing, praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes. I ask forgiveness for my bad ways: my life had no use on earth.
dream country moving
There's a country spread out in the sky, a credulous carpet of rainbows and crepuscular plants: I move toward it just a bit haggardly, trampling a gravedigger's rubble still moist from the spade to dream in a bedlam of vegetables.
About me, nothing worse they will tell you, my love, than what I told you
rain dust names
Nobody can claim the name of Pedro, nobody is Rosa or María, all of us are dust or sand, all of us are rain under rain. They have spoken to me of Venezuelas, of Chiles and Paraguays; I have no idea what they are saying. I know only the skin of the earth and I know it has no name.
past vegetables ivory
I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.
oblivion importance courtroom
And what importance do I have in the courtroom of oblivion?
writing breathing
For me writing is like breathing. I could not live without breathing and I could not live without writing.
names unity brotherhood
I am everybody and every time, I always call myself by your name.
dream land roots
Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance climbed up through my conscious mind as if suddenly the roots I had left behind cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood - and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent.