Silence

  Sometimes, someone else can capture your thoughts so perfectly that you'd swear they must have looked straight into your soul. I'm referring to the following passage by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The original is in Spanish, and, like anything translated, loses a shade of its beauty here. I've known this poem for years, but the words have never resonated with me quite like they do tonight.


Tonight, I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is full of stars
and they shiver, sapphires in the distance.'

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one have not loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the meadow.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is full of stars, and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance, someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to bring her to me.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night, whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one, I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.


-Pablo Neruda