The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
and took flight through the lips and the mouth.
Farther away and nearer
still, still it came
from dead fathers and from wondering races,
from lands which had turned to stone,
lands weary of their poor tribes,
for when grief took to the roads
the people set out and arrived
and married new land and water
to grow their words again.
And so this is the inheritance;
this is the wavelength which connects us
with dead men and the dawning
of new beings not yet come to light.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Inheritance
A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Reading, Books
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Love
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Authors & Writing, Rain
You are the daughter of the sea,
oregano’s first cousin.
Swimmer, your body is pure as the water;
cook, your blood is quick as the soil.
Everything you do is full of flowers, rich with the earth.
Your eyes go out toward the water, and the waves rise;
your hands go out to the earth and the seeds swell;
you know the deep essence of water and the earth,
conjoined in you like a formula for clay.
Naiad: cut your body into turquoise pieces,
they will bloom resurrected in the kitchen.
This is how you become everything that lives.
And so at last, you sleep, in the circle of my arms
that push back the shadows so that you can rest –
vegetables, seaweed, herbs: the foam of your dreams.
—Pablo Neruda
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
—Pablo Neruda
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes my rage, forgetting everything.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Walking
They can cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop the coming of spring.
—Pablo Neruda
Returned me, oh sun,
to my wild destiny,
rain of the ancient wood,
bringing me back to the aroma of swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp at the river-margins,
the smell of the larch tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded restlessness
of the towering araucaria.
Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Wilderness
Now, on the road to freedom, I was pausing for a moment near Temuco and could hear the voice of the water that had taught me to sing.
—Pablo Neruda
Topics: Youth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Adlai Stevenson American Diplomat
- Madeleine Albright Czech-born American Diplomat
- Romain Gary French Diplomat
- R. James Woolsey, Jr. American Diplomat
- Pierre Beaumarchais French Inventor
- Carlos P. Romulo Philippine Diplomat
- Henry Kissinger American Diplomat
- Bertolt Brecht German Poet
- Geoffrey Chaucer English Poet
- James Russell Lowell American Poet, Critic
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