I say love, and the world populates itself with doves.
PABLO NERUDA, Get Used to Seeing the Shadow Behind Me
- From each crime are born bullets
- that will one day seek out in you
- where the heart lies.
PABLO NERUDA, "I Explain a Few Things"
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.
- Take bread away from me, if you wish,
- take air away, but
- do not take from me your laughter.
PABLO NERUDA, "Your Laughter"
Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?
PABLO NERUDA, The Book of Questions
Oh each successive night that comes has something in it of an abandoned ember that is slowly burning out, and it falls swathed in ruins, surrounded by funereal objects.
PABLO NERUDA, "The Night of the Soldier"
- I watch my words from a long way off.
- They are more yours than mine.
- They climb on my old suffering like ivy.
PABLO NERUDA, "So That You Will Hear Me"
- If we were not so single-minded
- about keeping our lives moving
- and for once could do nothing,
- perhaps a huge silence
- might interrupt this sadness
- of never understanding ourselves
- and of threatening ourselves with death
- Perhaps the world can teach us
- as when everything seems dead
- but later proves to be alive.
PABLO NERUDA, Extravagaria
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?
PABLO NERUDA, The Book of Questions
Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.
PABLO NERUDA, Winter Garden
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
PABLO NERUDA, "Tonight I Can Write"
- My struggle is harsh and I come back
- with eyes tired
- at times from having seen
- the unchanging earth,
- but when your laughter enters
- it rises to the sky seeking me
- and it opens for me all
- the doors of life.
PABLO NERUDA, "Your Laughter"
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
PABLO NERUDA, "Every Day You Play"
- Only do not forget, if I wake up crying
- it's only because in my dream I'm a lost child
- hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands.
Laughter is the language of the soul.
PABLO NERUDA, I Explain a Few Things
- This flesh and the other will be consumed,
- the flower will doubtless perish without residue,
- when death--sterile dawn, desiccated dust--
- comes one day into the girdle of the haughty island,
- and you, statue, daughter of man, will remain
- gazing with the empty eyes that rose
- up through one and another hand of the absent immortals.
PABLO NERUDA, "The Builders of Statues"
Love! Love until the night collapses!
PABLO NERUDA, "Come Up with Me"
On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
PABLO NERUDA, The Essential Neruda
