Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche

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.

translated by W.S. Merwin


Pablo Neruda
Always


I am not jealous


of what came before me.

Come with a man


on your shoulders,


come with a hundred men in your hair,


come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,


come like a river


full of drowned men


which flows down to the wild sea,


to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all


to where I am waiting for you;


we shall always be alone,


we shall always be you and I


alone on earth,


to start our life!

Pablo Neruda


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda

Someone introduced me to the work of Pablo Neruda some time ago and I have grown to love some of his poetry - and the more I read it the more embarrassed I become that I even attempted to write a love poem! How can a poem, written in another language, perfected to a different rhythm, resound so powerfully with alien words?

I am hanging up my poet pen.