Monday, March 26, 2007

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves 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 I loved her too.
How could one not have 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 pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry 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 tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
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. As she was before my kisses.
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.

Tonight I Can Write - Pablo Neruda


today i went to thalia to look for books and i saw pretty covers of neruda's twenty love poems and a song of despair as well as niffeneger's the time traveller's wife and i could not resist but to buy it; i bought amis' house of meetings last month and i think i will make this a habit, at least a book a month, and i will soon have my very own library in switzerland.

i am an impulsive buyer at times and i bought neruda only because i loved the title and the cover and it was a pleasant surprise that when i opened it i found one of my favourite poems; i was reading journals online and i saw something that made me recall too many things and it was appropriate to find this again i suppose. what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

(or, as amis says, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker and returns to kill you again.)

there is much truth in lyric verse, because verse falls to the soul like dew to pasture.
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work has been horrendous these days; a colleague was missing in action on saturday and today and we were severely understaffed on both times when the restuarant was compeletely full and it was only later at night that we realised that she was admitted to the mental hospital for work related stress.

there is much ambivalence about this knowledge, and it puzzles me greatly because no one deserves this, even though her working methods contrast completely from mine.

these days, i think i am getting too detached for my own good.