Poetry
“The World Filled Up” by Pablo Neruda
Such pretty treasures so lately laid up by acquisitive man, the man manufacturer! The planet I knew as a boy was stark naked, but it filled, little by little, with pulverized ingots, aluminum lemons, the electric intestines that hammer inside machines, which a synthetic Niagara poured over the kitchens. Now in our nineteen hundred and [...]
Poetry Friday: “A Century Dying” by Pablo Neruda
Thirty-two years to go to the new century: thirty-two heroical fanfares, thirty-two fires to stamp out while the world goes coughing up phlegm, wrapped in its dreams and atrocities. The tree of our bitterness has come full leaf: and the fall of our century will carry the foliage away: we watered the roots with our [...]
Belated Poetry Friday: “Ars Poetica (1)” by Pablo Neruda
As carpenter-poet, first I fit the wood to my need— on the knotty or satiny side: then I savor the smell with my hands, smell the colors, take the fragrant entirety, the whole system of silence, into my fingertips and slip off to sleep, or transmigrate, or strip to the skin and submerge in woody [...]
Poetry Friday: “Memory” by Pablo Neruda
All must be remembered: a turning wind, the threads in the threadbare event must be gathered, yard after yard of all we inhabited, the train’s long trajectory, and the trappings of sorrow. Should a rosebush by lost or a hare be confused with the night, should the pillars of memory topple out of my reach, [...]
Poetry Friday: “Summation” by Pablo Neruda
I am glad of the great obligations I imposed on myself. In my life many strange and material things have crowded together— fragile wraiths that entangled me, categorical mineral hands, an irrational wind that dismayed me, barbed kisses that scarred me, the hard reality of my brothers, my implacable vow to keep watchful, my penchant [...]
Poetry Friday: “Full Powers” by Pablo Neruda
I have a feeling I loved this poem so much because of the state I was in when I first read it: exhausted, hadn’t eaten all day, running on adrenaline. Maybe this is the delirious state that geniuses work in all the time. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help but love this poem. I write [...]
Poetry Friday: “Ode on Ironing” by Pablo Neruda
Poetry is white: it comes out of the water covered with drops, it wrinkles and piles up in heaps. We must spread out the whole skin of this planet, iron the white of the ocean: the hands go on moving, smoothing the sanctified surfaces, bringing all things to pass. Hands fashion each day of the [...]
Poetry Friday: “Piano” by Pablo Neruda
Midway through the concert the piano grew pensive, ignored in its gravedigger’s frock coat; but later it opened its mouth —the jaws of leviathan: the pianist then entered his piano and deployed like a crow; something happened, like a silvery downfall of pebbles or a hand in a pond, unobserved: a trickle of sweetness like [...]
Poetry Friday: from “Girl Gardening” by Pablo Neruda
Even so, your watery fingers, the dust of your heart, bring us word of fecundity, love, and summon the strength of my songs. Touching my heart while I sleep trees bloom on my dream. I waken and widen my eyes, and you plant in my flesh the darkening stars that rise in my song. So [...]
Poetry Friday: “The Poet” by Pablo Neruda
That time when I moved among happenings in the midst of my mournful devotions; that time when I cherished a leaflet of quartz, and stared at a lifetime’s vocation. I ranged in the markets of avarice where goodness is bought for a price, breathed the insensate miasmas of envy, the inhuman contention of masks and [...]
