 | Lust and Hunger |
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Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
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.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
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Many people tell me they just don't get poetry. That it just takes too much work to understand. I've never seen it that way and find poetry sometimes an even easier read than prose. The above poem is an example of just how easy it can be. A 1971 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Chilean writer Pablo Neruda jumps hurdles of language, time, and even politics (he was a communist) to reach out and remind us that the truth of passion is timeless and constant. Simply divine.
xo, Angela
I’m so glad to see this poem here at your blog, Angela.
I agree with you. Poetry can’t get any easier to understand than this. Much of Pablo Neruda’s writing is like this and it’s a shame more poetry instructors don’t utilize his works in their classrooms, which could surely open up a whole new world for many.
His words easily paint pictures that capture the reader’s imagination with ease. As you can tell, I’ve been a fan for a long time. Both of Mr. Neruda and you!
Some poetry can be cloggy & clumpy — I call it the Emperor’s Poetry because folks are so muddled by it they cannot point to it as crap so instead say it is impressive… Like the Emperor’s Clothes 😉
However, you always present lovely poetry. Both with examples like this and your own lovely creations. Kisses to you. 🙂
“Reading it [poetry], however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine.” Marianne Moore. Thanks to our genuine Angela, for another poem to add to our anthology.
Saddest Poem
Pablo Neruda
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”
The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.
To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.
As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.
The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.
I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.
Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.
Thanks Angela and PQS for these samples of Neruda’s poetry. Not a poet I knew; now I will.
Poetry like this has a pulse. I think it might be best having you read this to me, Angela, with my eyes closed….