The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

You make me thank god for every mistake I ever made, Because each one led me down the path that brought me to you.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then the little drops of anguish will all run together, the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift into me, choking my lost heart.

The Truth is in the prolouge. Death to the romantic fool., the expert in solitary confinement.

I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

You came to my life with what you were bringing, made of light and bread and shadow I expected you, and Like this I need you, Like this I love you, and to those who want to hear tomorrow that which I will not tell them, let them read it here, and let them back off today because it is early for these arguments.

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.

My eyes were consumed by your loveliness, but you have become my eyes.

Die Slowly' by Pablo Neruda: He who does not travel, who does not read, who does not listen to music, who does not find grace in himself, she who does not find grace in herself, dies slowly.

What's wrong with you? I look at you and I find nothing in you but two eyes like all eyes, a mouth lost among a thousand mouths that I have kissed, more beautiful, a body just like those that have slipped beneath my body without leaving any memory.

You undermine the horizon with your absence. Eternally in flight like the wave.

My love has two lifetimes to love you. That’s how I can love you when I don’t, and still love you when I do.

Woman, I would have been your child, to drink the milk of your breasts as from a well, to see and feel you at my side and have you in your gold laughter and your crystal voice. To feel you in my veins like God in the rivers and adore you in the sorrowful bones of dust and lime, to watch you passing painlessly by to emerge in the stanza-cleansed of all evil. How I would love you woman, how I would love you, love you as no one ever did! Die and still love you more. And still love you more and more.

I remember only a day that was perhaps never intended for me, it was an incessant day, without origins, Thursday. I was a man transported by chance with a woman vaguely found, we undressed as if to die or swim or grow old and we thrust ourselves one inside the other, she surrounding me like a hole, I cracking her like a bell, for she was the sound that wounded me and the hard dome determined to tremble.

Naked, you are blue as the night in Cuba; You have vines and stars in your hair; Naked, you are spacious and yellow As summer in a golden church.

Some poems survive it to become poems in another language,” he argued, “but others refuse to live in any language but their own, in which case the translator can manage no more than a reproduction, an effigy, of the original.