January 2011
40 posts
Piedra del sol/Sunstone
by Octavio Paz
willow of crystal, a poplar of water, a pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over, tree that is firmly rooted and that dances, turning course of a river that goes curving, advances and retreats, goes roundabout, arriving forever: the calm course of a star or the spring, appearing without urgency, water behind a stillness of closed eyelids flowing all night and pouring out...
“To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.”
-Octavio Paz
Movimiento/Motion
by Octavio Paz
If you are the amber mare I am the road of blood If you are the first snow I am he who lights the hearth of dawn If you are the tower of night I am the spike burning in your mind If you are the morning tide I am the first bird’s cry If you are the basket of oranges I am the knife of the sun If you are the...
Oda al limón
by Pablo Neruda
From blossoms released by the moonlight, from an aroma of exasperated love, steeped in fragrance, yellowness drifted from the lemon tree, and from its planetarium lemons descended to the earth.
Tender yield! It filled the coasts, the markets, with light, with unrefined gold; we opened two halves of a miracle, congealed acid trickled from the hemispheres of a star, the most...
Las Alturas de Machu Picchu / The Heights of Machu Picchu
Parts I-XI
by Pablo Neruda
I
From the air to the air, like an empty net,
I went on through streets and thin air, arriving and
leaving behind,
at autumn’s advent, the coin handed out
in the leaves, and between spring and ripe grain,
the fullness that love, as in a glove’s
fall, gives over to us like a long-drawn moon.
(Days of...
ODE AND BURGEONINGS
by Pablo Neruda
I
The taste of your mouth and the color of your skin,
skin, mouth, fruit of these swift days,
tell me, were they always beside you
through years and journeys and moons and suns
and earth and weeping and rain and joy
or is it only now that
they come from your roots,
only as water brings to the dry earth
burgeonings that it did not know,
or as to the lips of the forgotten...
