Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

"It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all timetables."

"Every day you play with the light of the universe."

"So that you will hear memy wordssometimes grow thinas the tracks of the gulls on the beaches. Necklace, drunken bellfor your hands smooth as grapes. And I watch my words from a long way off. They are more yours than mine. They climb on my old suffering like ivy. It climbs the same way on damp walls. You are to blame for this cruel sport. They are fleeing from my dark lair. You fill everything, you fill everything. Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,and they are more used to my sadness than you are. Now I want them to say what I want to say to youto make you hear as I want you to hear me. The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual. Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over. You listen to other voices in my painful voice. Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications. Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me. Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish. But my words become stained with your love. You occupy everything, you occupy everything. I am making them into an endless necklacefor your white hands, smooth as grapes."

"Like them you are tall and taciturn, and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage."

"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 snow like dew to the pasture."

"I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absentdistant and full of sorrow as though you had died One word then, one smile is enough And I'm happy; happy that it's not true"

"Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero. Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido."

"It was at that agethat poetry came in search of me."

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

"I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees."

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