seas

 

.

I learned the why of misfortune
In the school of water. 

The sea is a wounded planet
And the breaking is its greatness:
This star fell into our hands
From the tower of salt
Scatters its heritage

Of living shadow and furious light. 

It has not married the earth.

We still do not understand it.


—Pablo Neruda
William O’Daly version

 .

siesta hour

 

.

  

to bury our

face

in you, and

our hair, and

the soul!

When we're thirsty

we glimpse you

like

a mine or a mountain

of feasts,

but

among our longings and our teeth

you change

simply

into cool light

that slips in turn into

spring water

that touched us once

singing.

And that is why
you don't weigh us down,
in the siesta hour
that's like an oven,
you don't weigh us down,
you just
go by
and your heart, some cold ember,
turns itself into a single
drop of water.

—Pablo Neruda

.

beloved of the rivers

.

Beloved of the rivers, beset
by azure water and transparent drops,

like a tree of veins your spectre

of dark goddess biting apples:

and then awakening naked

to be tattooed by the rivers,

and in the wet heights your head

filled the world with new dew.

Water rose to your waist,

You are made of wellsprings

and lakes shone on your forehead.

From your sources of density you drew

water like vital tears

and hauled the river-beds to the sand

across the planetary night,

crossing rough, dilated stone,

breaking down on the way

all the salt of geology,

cutting through forests of compact walls

dislodging the muscles of quartz.


—Pablo Neruda

.

water is another matter

 

.

.

Everything on the earth bristled, the bramble

pricked and the green thread

nibbled away, the petal fell, falling

until the only flower was the falling itself.

Water is another matter,

has no direction but its own bright grace,

runs through all imaginable colors,

takes limpid lessons

from stone,

and in those functionings plays out

the unrealized ambitions of the foam. 

 

—Pablo Neruda

. 

  

sonnet

 

 

.

What I have given you,
will never be a burden,
because
what I gave you
was always yours,
the flower or the wood,
the word or walls,
food of fleeting
love, resting or burning
in our hands.

But all
I gave you,
all I give you,
all I extend to you,
will contain this secret
voice
of
water.


—Pablo Neruda

.