cinaed

"Sonata and Destructions"

by Pablo Neruda

After a good deal, after vague leagues,
confused about domains, uncertain about territories,
accompanied by faint hopes
and faithless companies and uneasy dreams,
I love the tenacity that still survives in my eyes,
I hear in my heart my horseman steps,
I bite the dormant fire and the ruined salt,
and at night, dark in atmosphere and fugitive mourning,
he who keeps vigil at the edge of camps,
the armed traveler of sterile resistances,
prisoner amid growing shadows and trembling wings,
I feel that I am he, and my arm of stone defends me.

There is among the sciences of weeping a confused altar,
and in my session of perfumeless twilights,
in my abandoned bedrooms where the moon dwells,
and inherited chandeliers, and destructions that are dear to me,
I adore my own lost being, my imperfect substance,
my silver set and my eternal loss.
The moist grape burned, and its funereal water
still wavers, still resides,
and the sterile patrimony, and the treacherous domicile.

Who made a ceremony of ashes?
Who loved the lost, who protected the last?
the bone of the father, the wood of the dead ship,
and its own ending, its very flight,
its sad force, its miserable god?

I spy, then, on the inanimate and the doleful,
and the strange testimony that I affirm,
with cruel efficiency and written in ashes,
is the form oblivion that I prefer,
the name that I give to the earth, the value of my dreams,
the interminable quantity that I divide
with my winter eyes, during each day of this world.