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Michael R Burch Mar 2020
Love Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I do not love you like coral or topaz,
or the blazing hearth’s incandescent white flame:
I love you like phantoms embraced in the dark,
secretly, in shadows, unrevealed and unnamed.

I love you like shrubs that refuse to bloom
while pregnant with the radiance of mysterious flowers;
now thanks to your love an earthy fragrance
lives dimly in my body’s odors.

I love you without knowing how, when, why or where;
I love you forthrightly, without complications or care:
I love you this way because I know no other.

Here, where “I” no longer exists, nor “you” ...
so close that your hand on my chest is my own,
so close that your eyes close gently on my dreams.

Keywords/Tags: Neruda, translation, Spanish, love, sonnet, rose, topaz, coral, dark, shadow, obscure, secret, fragrance, hand, chest, eyes, close, dreams



More Pablo Neruda translations ...

You can crop all the flowers but you cannot detain spring.
―Pablo Neruda, loose translation by Michael R. Burch

While nothing can save us from death,
still love can redeem each breath.
―Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

As if you were set on fire from within,
the moon whitens your skin.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Please understand that when I awaken weeping
it's because I dreamed I was a lost child
searching the leaf-heaps for your hands in the darkness.
―Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I’m no longer in love with her, that's certain ...
yet perhaps I love her still.
Love is so short, forgetting so long!
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I alone own my darkness.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I own my own darkness, alone.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch






Religión en el Este (“Religion in the East”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Tom Merrill

I realized in Rangoon:
the gods were our enemies
as much as God;
alabaster gods elongated like white whales;
gilded gods gleaming like golden ears of corn;
serpentine gods coiling around the crime of being born;
naked detached buddhas
smiling enigmatically at cocktail parties,
contemplating pointless eternity
like Christ on his grotesque cross;
all of them capable of any atrocity,
of imposing their heaven upon us;
all armed with implements of torture, or death;
all demanding piety or, better yet, our blood;
avaricious gods imagined by men
to excuse their cowardice, or to conceal it;
gods everywhere, inescapable;
and the whole earth reeking of heaven,
for sale, like merchandise.



In all the languages of men only the poor will know your name.—Pablo Neruda



The Heights of Machu Picchu, Canto VIII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Martin Mc Carthy, who put me up to it

Ascend with me, my American love!

Let’s kiss these mysterious stones together!

The Urubamba’s torrential silver
lures pollen to fly from its golden chalice
while above this canyon’s unbroken silence
everything soars: the climbing grapevines’ fruitless branches,
the shopworn plants, each inflexible garland.

Come, elfin life, test your wings above the earth,
test the cold, crystalline air,
****** the embrittled emeralds aside,
test even these frigid waters, cascading from the icepacks.

Test love, lambent Love itself, until the night's sudden implosion
over the Andes' atlean peaks,
when, reeling on the reddening knees of dawn,
you feast your startled eyes on its snowblind offspring.

Oh Wilkamayu of the sonorous looms,
when you unleash your thunderbursts,
when you crazily rend your thunder’s skeins
leaving gauzy white clouds to bind wounded snow,
when your wild winds whip sheer cliffs into avalanches,
roaring as if to arouse the sky from its sleep,
what language will you awaken at last in the ear,
thus lately freed from your Andean inundations?

Who imprisoned the frigid lightning bolt,
left it chained to these Promethean heights,
scattered its glacial tears,
brandished its mercurial swords,
hammered out the threads of its war-torn stamens,
led it to this warrior's bower
then left it to lie in a rocky fissure?

What do your harried illuminations reveal,
your rebellious lightnings signal?
Must we travel inhibited by words?
Impeded by frozen syllables,
these dark languages, gold-brocaded banners,
fathomless mouths and conquered cries
arising from your silver arterial waters?

Who decapitates lily-like eyelids
from those come to observe the earth’s occupants?
Who scatters dead seeds
flung from your waterfall hands
only to atrophy here
into fossilized coal?

Who flings branches over precipices
only to bury our banal farewells?

On love, Love!, do not approach the boundaries;
avoid idle adoration of sunken heads;
nor let time exhaust all possibilities
in this strange abode of broken overtures;
nor think, between these cascading waters and sheer cliff walls,
to reclaim high mountains’ elevated airs,
nor the wind’s white laminations,
nor the blind canal’s guidance toward high cordilleras,
nor the dew’s brilliant solicitations;
but ascend, blossom by blossom, through the thickets,
clambering up the coiling serpent flung from the crags above.

From this escarpment zone of flint and forest,
from this emerald stardust broken by jungle clearings,
Mantur, the valley, emerges like a living creature
save for its eerie silence.

Ascend to my very being, to my own individual dawn,
even to this higher crown of solitudes.

This fallen kingdom survives in us nonetheless.

While racing across the Andes' sundial the condor's shadow
passes black as a marauder.



For now, I ask no more than the justice of eating.—Pablo Neruda



La Barcarola Termina (“The Watersong Ends”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is time, love, to sever the somber rose,
to shut off the stars, to re-bury the ashes in earth;
and then, in the insurrection of light, to awake with those who awoke,
lest we continue this dream of reaching the far shore of a sea without shores.



One Pillar
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

One pillar props up consolations,
so please don’t bother telling me anything!
Does the pale metalloid heal you, really?
I have a terrible fear of re-becoming an animal,
of the terrible anger that devolves men to boys.
And after so many words?



Soliloquio en Tinieblas (“Soliloquy at Twilight”)
from Estravagario, 1958
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don’t you know there’s no one in the streets
and no one inside the houses either? Only eyes in the windows.
If you lack someplace to sleep,
knock on a door and they’ll open it,
but only to a certain point,
and you’ll see that it’s cold inside,
that the house is empty
and wants nothing to do with you,
because your stories are worthless.
And if you suggest tenderness
the dog and cat will bite you.



Poesía (“Poetry”)
from Memorial de Isla Negra, 1964
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Something transpired in my soul,
a fit of fever or a flurry of wings,
after which I made my way,
deciphering that fire;
finally I wrote the first faint line,
pale, insubstantial, pure nonsense,
or perhaps the pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing;
then suddenly I saw
the heavens
revealed,
gates flung wide open.



I love you only because I love you
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
Between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you’re the one I love;
I hate you deeply, but hatred
Bends me all the more toward you, so that the measure of my variableness
Is that I do not see you, but love you blindly.

Perhaps January’s frigid light will consume my heart with its cruel rays,
robbing me of any hope of peace.

In this tragic plot, I am the one who dies,
Love’s only victim,
And I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, my Love, in fire and blood.



Every Day You Play
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Every day you play with Infinity’s rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water.
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp tightly
like a cornucopia, every day, between my hands ...



Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.

I long for your liquid laughter,
for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
I lust for your fingernails' pale marbles.
I want to devour your ******* like almonds, whole.

I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
to lick your eyelashes' flickering shade.

I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
seeking your heart's scorching heat
like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.



The Book of Questions
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Is the rose ****
or is that just how she dresses?

Why do trees conceal
their spectacular roots?

Who hears the confession
of the getaway car?

Is there anything sadder
than a train standing motionless in the rain?



In El Salvador, Death
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Death still surveils El Salvador.
The blood of murdered peasants has never clotted;
time cannot congeal it,
nor does the rain erase it from the roads.
Fifteen thousand were machine-gunned dead
by Martinez, the murderer.
To this day the coppery taste of blood still flavors
the land, bread and wine of El Salvador.



If You Forget Me
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I need you to know one thing ...
You know
how it goes:
if I gaze up at the glowing moon,
if observe the blazing autumn’s reddening branches from my window,
if I touch the impalpable ash of the charred log’s wrinkled body ...
everything returns me to you,
as if everything that exists
―all aromas, sights, solids―
were small boats
sailing toward those isles of yours that await me.

However ...
if little by little you stop loving me
then I shall stop loving you, little by little.

And if you suddenly
forget me,
do not bother to investigate,
for I shall have immediately
forgotten you
also.

If you think my love strange and mad―
this whirlwind of streaming banners
gusting through me,
so that you elect to leave me at the shore
where my heart lacks roots,
just remember that, on that very day,
at that very hour,
I shall raise my arms
and my roots will sail off
to find some more favorable land.

But
if each day
and every hour,
you feel destined to be with me,
if you greet me with implacable sweetness,
and if each day
and every hour
flowers blossom on your lips to entice me, ...
then ah my love,
oh my only, my own,
all that fire will be reinfernoed in me
and nothing within me will be extinguished or forgotten;
my love will feed on your love, my beloved,
and as long as you live it will be me in your arms ...
as long as you never leave mine.



Sonnet XLV
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don't wander far away, not even for a day, because―
how can I explain? A day is too long ...
and I’ll be waiting for you, like a man in an empty station
where the trains all stand motionless.

Don't leave me, my dear, not even for an hour, because―
then despair’s raindrops will all run blurrily together,
and the smoke that drifts lazily in search of a home
will descend hazily on me, suffocating my heart.

Darling, may your lovely silhouette never dissolve in the surf;
may your lashes never flutter at an indecipherable distance.
Please don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because then you'll have gone far too far
and I'll wander aimlessly, amazed, asking all the earth:
Will she ever return? Will she spurn me, dying?



My Dog Died
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My dog died;
so I buried him in the backyard garden
next to some rusted machine.

One day I'll rejoin him, over there,
but for now he's gone
with his shaggy mane, his crude manners and his cold, clammy nose,
while I, the atheist who never believed
in any heaven for human beings,
now believe in a paradise I'm unfit to enter.

Yes, I somehow now believe in a heavenly kennel
where my dog awaits my arrival
wagging his tail in furious friendship!

But I'll not indulge in sadness here:
why bewail a companion
who was never servile?

His friendship was more like that of a porcupine
preserving its prickly autonomy.

His was the friendship of a distant star
with no more intimacy than true friendship called for
and no false demonstrations:
he never clambered over me
coating my clothes with mange;
he never assaulted my knee
like dogs obsessed with ***.

But he used to gaze up at me,
giving me the attention my ego demanded,
while helping this vainglorious man
understand my concerns were none of his.

Aye, and with those bright eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd gaze up at me
contentedly;
it was a look he reserved for me alone
all his entire sweet, gentle life,
always merely there, never troubling me,
never demanding anything.

Aye, and often I envied his energetic tail
as we strode the shores of Isla Negra together,
in winter weather, wild birds swarming skyward
as my golden-maned friend leapt about,
supercharged by the sea's electric surges,
sniffing away wildly, his tail held *****,
his face suffused with the salt spray.

Joy! Joy! Joy!
As only dogs experience joy
in the shameless exuberance
of their guiltless spirits.

Thus there are no sad good-byes
for my dog who died;
we never once lied to each other.

He died, he's gone, I buried him;
that's all there is to it.



Tonight I will write the saddest lines
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Tonight I will write the saddest lines.
I will write, for example, “The night is less bright
and a few stars shiver in the distance
as I remember her unwarranted light ...”

Tonight I will write her the saddest lines:
that I loved her as she loved me too, sometimes,
all those long, lonely nights when I held her tight
and filled her ears with indecipherable rhymes ...

Then she loved me too, as I also loved her,
compelled by the spell of her enormous eyes.
Tonight I will write her the saddest lines
as I ponder love’s death and our mutual crimes.

Outside I hear night―silent, cold, dark, immense―
as these delicate words fall, useless as dew.
Oh, what does it matter that love came to naught
if love was false, or perhaps even true?

And yet I hear songs being sung in the distance.
How can I forget her, so soon since I lost her?
I seek to regain her, somehow bring her closer.
But my heart has been blinded; she will not appear!

Now moonlight and starlight whiten dark trees.
We also are ghosts, by love’s failing light.
My love has failed me, but how I once loved her!
My voice ... this cursed wind ... what use to recite?

Another’s. She will soon be another’s.
Her body, her voice, her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her! And why should I love her
when love is sad, short, mad, fickle, unwise?

Because of cold nights we clung through so closely,
I’m not satisfied to know she is gone.
And while I must end this hell I now suffer,
It’s sad to remember all love left undone.
These are my modern English translations of Spanish poems by Pablo Neruda, including "The Heights of Machu Picchu" and several love sonnets and epigrams. - Michael R. Burch
Julian Aug 2015
The oceans’ froth betrothed to lunatic scoff
The sublunary elegance of a subdued earthen cough
Infectious pulchritude conjures snow-globe turpitude
Defiant humility professes to know the rudeness of the crude
Distilled casually in a leery trance
Terpsichorean choreography of a hallowed prance
Callow scowls affix the hebetude of anger to the sauciness of banter
Gallant cavalries court the cult of she and enamor and enchant her
Foretold calamities proceed like clockwork from God’s destructive jaundice
Death deployed as a sententious homily of wraiths that taunt us
At every turn fatidic inspirations work to cement a known outcome
Averted gaze away from rampant gays and fire-and-brimstone bunkum
We cherish a world where the stodgy and outmoded monopolize choice considerations
Where hedonism abreast of asceticism are internecine intimidations
Suffer like Christ and buffer like tenacious poverty sustained by rice
Dare to glower with menacing insistence at the known outcome of errant dice
Soothsayers soothe prayers but cataclysm still dares
To pulverize innocent insouciance and become the cynosure of trepidation and stares
Heaven blares a deafening “obey” while hell stays silent to lure the prey
Hobnob with hobgoblins and expect opprobrium to park and stay
Gentility and class-divisions orchestrate a frozen system of tenacious prisons
Stalking the lifeblood of mainlined ecstasies and surgical incisions
Minority Report within the grasp of the majority uproar
Dalliance with a self-fulfilling time means there will always be a bout between Bush and Gore
Lecherous eyes prize a hedged bush and irascible lies seek copious gore
But because the bush ensconces the ****** in bed with China the twin towers imploded for common core
Mondegreens serenade a mistaken flirtation with a time traversed and mastered
Swelling tides hearken the moon to make a hypothetical bonanza out of disaster
Enumerated infinity within esoteric grasp and pandered sequester
Bedazzled of foreknowledge  it charters the uncharted exploitation faster and faster
Burgeoning funds entertain a mind cloistered by infamy and oppressed by indecency
Burbling puns ecstatic about the perpetuity of guns hector the province of a token leniency
Squander the day and indulge the night by knowing exactly the demise of every shooting star
Knowing the origin and legacy of every single scar
Knowing the path creates the path known
Every single stock you know you should with alacrity own
Prosperous kinship and insubordinate brinksmanship win the prejudiced award
Fencing with lethal intent the specter of death devolves into irenic accord
Envy the impregnable corporate machine and its unassailable pipe dream
Hunt the Wolfs of Wall Street until panic evolves into cacophony of screams
Democratization of prophecy will cue the most titanic robbery
Shills looking for upstart thrills will pretend an unwarranted snobbery
Paradox is impossible because every moment elapsed is indelible and irrevocable
Every frisson of love is fertile and impregnable
So rejoice that the masters of the clock invest in select stocks
And hope that parcels of secrecy tumble from the 1919 White Sox
Emerald Street knows When the Music ‘s Over
Brandished crumbs adorned with sportive panache clothed in a lucky clover
Deprived of snide tithes and the confessions of millions protest a catholic cabal of universalism draped in quaint overalls
Mock the hegemony of the sailing class and their brisk and copious squalls
Opulent scions vouch for the failsafe prerogatives of Zion
Sleeping awake we indulge the oneiromancies of Orion
Cinematic wonders regale glorified eavesdropped blunders
Until the secrecy of the machine is so conspicuously in sight it tears the elected pantheon asunder
A master race of an intelligent nepotism in denial of its own disgrace
Exploits the argosy of secrets of the flying-disked race
But one day a challenger like a rooster will orient the demotic vogue towards the treasure trove
And pirates will prosper in burgeoning droves
Myths foisted will debunk themselves as eternity preens its chosen wealth
Even the most furtive endeavors will have to equip even more stealth
That day will prompt an arms race and a worms race
To burrow beneath the chasms of malcontent and adopt and insular embrace
They billow now with toxicity and malignancy
Even death will have alternative contingencies
The resplendent future will capture the common heart
For the accumulated wisdom of words will make us infinitely more smart
Billy B Oct 2012
A Tribute

A king takes supper on a creaking deathbed. Featureless, winged creatures zoom by the dark condensed windows. Micro parasites build adobe headquarters in his soft tissue. Reaching for a plate,    he groans the terabyting howl that’s prescribed with chemotherapy. Qwerty and light from the drugs, he stares at the apple on his tray. Lost in its curves, he finds himself trapped in a safari of memories. A dream devolves upon his downtrodden mind….

The canopy is populated with twittering, angry birds. Pools of social blood attract flies to the googolplex degree. He stumbles through the dell, suspicious forest while a tremulous, fiery fox stalks behind his echoing footfalls. Pixar apes swing from trees chased by grisly, disney men with guns and trucks. A large eye tunes the darkness and blinks red upon an aging mountain lion in shadow’s brush.



The sony rays belight foliage in auspicious, plaid-orange hues. This amazon of experience plugs the wanderer into a hard drive of intelligence – a gateway to an encyclopedia of wikis and browsers, expanse enough for any backdrop rooftop audience to be faux-enthralled and eager. There are grumblings in the distance of another engine tromping the scope in search of something new and useless. A rumorous bat upsets the plagiarizing tide of the Atlantic Pea Sea. A snake slinks out of the blossoms clinging to the vines among a macintosh tree and bites the salty flier of the washboard night; cyber venom invades his veins.

The average, homeless, bounding, warrior awakens to find a cold supper on his lap and another syringe in his arm. His remaining gums support his teeth as they bite into the apple. He swallows, sighs, and rests his balding, crescent, once-handsome head on the white pillow.  The green fruit tumbles gently out of bed and mutely rolls to the floor.
With that, Steve Jobs is dead.
Michael R Burch Mar 2020
Every Day You Play
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Every day you play with Infinity’s rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water.
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp tightly
like a cornucopia, every day, between my hands ...

Keywords/Tags: Neruda, translation, Spanish, day, play, infinity, infinity's, rays, exquisite, visitor, flowers, water, head, clasp, hands



More Pablo Neruda translations ...


These are English translations of Spanish poems by Pablo Neruda. There are also English translations of Pablo Neruda quotes and epigrams.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and is generally considered to be one of the world's best poets. Indeed, he was called "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language" by Gabriel García Márquez.

Neruda always wrote in green ink, the color of esperanza (hope).



Love! Love until the night implodes!—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



You can crop all the flowers but you cannot detain spring.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



As if you were set on fire from within,
the moon whitens your skin.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



The Book of Questions
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Is the rose ****
or is that just how she dresses?

Why do trees conceal
their spectacular roots?

Who hears the confession
of the getaway car?

Is there anything sadder
than a train standing motionless in the rain?



While nothing can save us from death,
still love can redeem each breath.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



In El Salvador, Death
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Death still surveils El Salvador.
The blood of murdered peasants has never clotted;
time cannot congeal it,
nor does the rain erase it from the roads.
Fifteen thousand were machine-gunned dead
by Martinez, the murderer.
To this day the coppery taste of blood still flavors
the land, bread and wine of El Salvador.



Please understand that when I awaken weeping
it's because I dreamed I was a lost child
searching the leaf-heaps for your hands in the darkness.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Love Sonnet LXVI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you’re the one I love;
I hate you deeply, but hatred makes me implore you all the more
so that in my inconstancy
I do not see you, but love you blindly.

Perhaps January’s frigid light
will consume my heart with its cruel rays,
robbing me of the key to contentment.

In this tragic plot, I ****** myself
and I will die loveless because I love you,
because I love you, my Love, in fire and in blood.



I'm no longer in love with her, that's certain ...
yet perhaps I love her still.
Love is so short, forgetting so long!
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.

I long for your liquid laughter,
for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
I lust for your fingernails' pale marbles.
I want to devour your ******* like almonds, whole.

I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
to lick your eyelashes' flickering shade.

I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
seeking your heart's scorching heat
like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.



I own my own darkness, alone.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I alone own my darkness.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Love Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I do not love you like coral or topaz,
or the blazing hearth's incandescent white flame;
I love you like phantoms embraced in the dark ...
secretly, in shadows, unrevealed & unnamed.

I love you like bushes that refuse to bloom
while pregnant with the radiance of mysterious flowers;
now, thanks to your love, an earthy fragrance
lives dimly in my body's odors.

I love you without knowing—how, when, why or where;
I love you forthrightly, without complications or care;
I love you this way because I know no other.

Here, where "I" no longer exists ... so it seems ...
so close that your hand on my chest is my own,
so close that your eyes close gently on my dreams.



I like for you to be still: it’s as if you were absent;
then you hear me from far away, yet my voice fails to touch you.
—Pablo Neruda “Me Gustas Cuando Callas” translation by Michael R. Burch



If You Forget Me
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I need you to know one thing ...

You know
how it goes:
if I gaze up at the glowing moon,
if observe the blazing autumn’s reddening branches from my window,
if I touch the impalpable ash of the charred log’s wrinkled body ...
everything returns me to you,
as if everything that exists
—all aromas, sights, solids—
were small boats
sailing toward those isles of yours that await me.

However ...
if little by little you stop loving me
then I shall stop loving you, little by little.

And if you suddenly
forget me,
do not bother to investigate,
for I shall have immediately
forgotten you
also.

If you think my love strange and mad—
this whirlwind of streaming banners
gusting through me,
so that you elect to leave me at the shore
where my heart lacks roots,
just remember that, on that very day,
at that very hour,
I shall raise my arms
and my roots will sail off
to find some more favorable land.

But
if each day
and every hour,
you feel destined to be with me,
if you greet me with implacable sweetness,
and if each day
and every hour
flowers blossom on your lips to entice me, ...
then ah my love,
oh my only, my own,
all that fire will be reinfernoed in me
and nothing within me will be extinguished or forgotten;
my love will feed on your love, my beloved,
and as long as you live it will be me in your arms ...
as long as you never leave mine.



Laughter is the soul's language.—Pablo Neruda



Sonnet XLV
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don't wander far away, not even for a day, because—
how can I explain? A day is too long ...
and I’ll be waiting for you, like a man in an empty station
where the trains all stand motionless.

Don't leave me, my dear, not even for an hour, because—
then despair’s raindrops will all run blurrily together,
and the smoke that drifts lazily in search of a home
will descend hazily on me, suffocating my heart.

Darling, may your lovely silhouette never dissolve in the surf;
may your lashes never flutter at an indecipherable distance.
Please don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because then you'll have gone far too far
and I'll wander aimlessly, amazed, asking all the earth:
Will she ever return? Will she spurn me, dying?



I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.—Pablo Neruda



My Dog Died
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My dog died;
so I buried him in the backyard garden
next to some rusted machine.

One day I'll rejoin him, over there,
but for now he's gone
with his shaggy mane, his crude manners and his cold, clammy nose,
while I, the atheist who never believed
in any heaven for human beings,
now believe in a paradise I'm unfit to enter.

Yes, I somehow now believe in a heavenly kennel
where my dog awaits my arrival
wagging his tail in furious friendship!

But I'll not indulge in sadness here:
why bewail a companion
who was never servile?

His friendship was more like that of a porcupine
preserving its prickly autonomy.

His was the friendship of a distant star
with no more intimacy than true friendship called for
and no false demonstrations:
he never clambered over me
coating my clothes with mange;
he never assaulted my knee
like dogs obsessed with ***.

But he used to gaze up at me,
giving me the attention my ego demanded,
while helping this vainglorious man
understand my concerns were none of his.

Aye, and with those bright eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd gaze up at me
contentedly;
it was a look he reserved for me alone
all his entire sweet, gentle life,
always merely there, never troubling me,
never demanding anything.

Aye, and often I envied his energetic tail
as we strode the shores of Isla Negra together,
in winter weather, wild birds swarming skyward
as my golden-maned friend leapt about,
supercharged by the sea's electric surges,
sniffing away wildly, his tail held *****,
his face suffused with the salt spray.

Joy! Joy! Joy!
As only dogs experience joy
in the shameless exuberance
of their guiltless spirits.

Thus there are no sad good-byes
for my dog who died;
we never once lied to each other.

He died, he's gone, I buried him;
that's all there is to it.



Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.—Pablo Neruda



Tonight I will write the saddest lines
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Tonight I will write the saddest lines.
I will write, for example, “The night is less bright
and a few stars shiver in the distance
as I remember her unwarranted light ...”

Tonight I will write her the saddest lines:
that I loved her as she loved me too, sometimes,
all those long, lonely nights when I held her tight
and filled her ears with indecipherable rhymes ...

Then she loved me too, as I also loved her,
compelled by the spell of her enormous eyes.
Tonight I will write her the saddest lines
as I ponder love’s death and our mutual crimes.

Outside I hear night—silent, cold, dark, immense—
as these delicate words fall, useless as dew.
Oh, what does it matter that love came to naught
if love was false, or perhaps even true?

And yet I hear songs being sung in the distance.
How can I forget her, so soon since I lost her?
I seek to regain her, somehow bring her closer.
But my heart has been blinded; she will not appear!

Now moonlight and starlight whiten dark trees.
We also are ghosts, by love’s failing light.
My love has failed me, but how I once loved her!
My voice ... this cursed wind ... what use to recite?

Another’s. She will soon be another’s.
Her body, her voice, her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her! And why should I love her
when love is sad, short, mad, fickle, unwise?

Because of cold nights we clung through so closely,
I’m not satisfied to know she is gone.
And while I must end this hell I now suffer,
It’s sad to remember all love left undone.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.—Pablo Neruda



Religión en el Este (“Religion in the East”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Tom Merrill

I realized in Rangoon:
the gods were our enemies
as much as God;
alabaster gods elongated like white whales;
gilded gods gleaming like golden ears of corn;
serpentine gods coiling around the crime of being born;
naked detached buddhas
smiling enigmatically at cocktail parties,
contemplating pointless eternity
like Christ on his grotesque cross;
all of them capable of any atrocity,
of imposing their heaven upon us;
all armed with implements of torture, or death;
all demanding piety or, better yet, our blood;
avaricious gods imagined by men
to excuse their cowardice, or to conceal it;
gods everywhere, inescapable;
and the whole earth reeking of heaven,
for sale, like merchandise.



In all the languages of men only the poor will know your name.—Pablo Neruda



The Heights of Machu Picchu, Canto VIII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Martin Mc Carthy, who put me up to it

Ascend with me, my American love!

Let’s kiss these mysterious stones together!

The Urubamba’s torrential silver
lures pollen to fly from its golden chalice
while above this canyon’s unbroken silence
everything soars: the climbing grapevines’ fruitless branches,
the shopworn plants, each inflexible garland.

Come, elfin life, test your wings above the earth,
test the cold, crystalline air,
****** the embrittled emeralds aside,
test even these frigid waters, cascading from the icepacks.

Test love, lambent Love itself, until the night's sudden implosion
over the Andes' atlean peaks,
when, reeling on the reddening knees of dawn,
you feast your startled eyes on its snowblind offspring.

Oh Wilkamayu of the sonorous looms,
when you unleash your thunderbursts,
when you crazily rend your thunder’s skeins
leaving gauzy white clouds to bind wounded snow,
when your wild winds whip sheer cliffs into avalanches,
roaring as if to arouse the sky from its sleep,
what language will you awaken at last in the ear,
thus lately freed from your Andean inundations?

Who imprisoned the frigid lightning bolt,
left it chained to these Promethean heights,
scattered its glacial tears,
brandished its mercurial swords,
hammered out the threads of its war-torn stamens,
led it to this warrior's bower
then left it to lie in a rocky fissure?

What do your harried illuminations reveal,
your rebellious lightnings signal?
Must we travel inhibited by words?
Impeded by frozen syllables,
these dark languages, gold-brocaded banners,
fathomless mouths and conquered cries
arising from your silver arterial waters?

Who decapitates lily-like eyelids
from those come to observe the earth’s occupants?
Who scatters dead seeds
flung from your waterfall hands
only to atrophy here
into fossilized coal?

Who flings branches over precipices
only to bury our banal farewells?

On love, Love!, do not approach the boundaries;
avoid idle adoration of sunken heads;
nor let time exhaust all possibilities
in this strange abode of broken overtures;
nor think, between these cascading waters and sheer cliff walls,
to reclaim high mountains’ elevated airs,
nor the wind’s white laminations,
nor the blind canal’s guidance toward high cordilleras,
nor the dew’s brilliant solicitations;
but ascend, blossom by blossom, through the thickets,
clambering up the coiling serpent flung from the crags above.

From this escarpment zone of flint and forest,
from this emerald stardust broken by jungle clearings,
Mantur, the valley, emerges like a living creature
save for its eerie silence.

Ascend to my very being, to my own individual dawn,
even to this higher crown of solitudes.

This fallen kingdom survives in us nonetheless.

While racing across the Andes' sundial the condor's shadow
passes black as a marauder.



For now, I ask no more than the justice of eating.—Pablo Neruda



La Barcarola Termina (“The Watersong Ends”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is time, love, to sever the somber rose,
to shut off the stars, to re-bury the ashes in earth;
and then, in the insurrection of light, to awake with those who awoke,
lest we continue this dream of reaching the far shore of a sea without shores.



One Pillar
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

One pillar props up consolations,
so please don’t bother telling me anything!
Does the pale metalloid heal you, really?
I have a terrible fear of re-becoming an animal,
of the terrible anger that devolves men to boys.
And after so many words?



Soliloquio en Tinieblas (“Soliloquy at Twilight”)
from Estravagario, 1958
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don’t you know there’s no one in the streets
and no one inside the houses either? Only eyes in the windows.
If you lack someplace to sleep,
knock on a door and they’ll open it,
but only to a certain point,
and you’ll see that it’s cold inside,
that the house is empty
and wants nothing to do with you,
because your stories are worthless.
And if you suggest tenderness
the dog and cat will bite you.



Poesía (“Poetry”)
from Memorial de Isla Negra, 1964
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Something transpired in my soul,
a fit of fever or a flurry of wings,
after which I made my way,
deciphering that fire;
finally I wrote the first faint line,
pale, insubstantial, pure nonsense,
or perhaps the pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing;
then suddenly I saw
the heavens
revealed,
gates flung wide open.

Keywords/Tags: Pablo Neruda English Translations, Spanish Poems, Love Sonnets, Quotes, Epigrams, Machu Picchu
These are modern English translations by Michael R. Burch of Spanish poems by Pablo Neruda, including "The Heights of Machu Picchu" and several love sonnets and epigrams.
Saint Audrey Jun 2018
Stake claim, enslave
Falling behind
A wake so odd
Cosmic, wretched truth
Will all compose
With repetition
Til all devolves

Equally wrong choices, with dire stakes
Options weighed, time again

Derived presets, and presupposition
Derivative motion,  placed on this clean slate
And left for a lifetime
Of horrid substitutions
Joseph S C Pope Mar 2013
I

Crested by the infamous gown
during a tribute                            to all digestible,
                                                     ­  sentient,
                                           grown strips of light
            playing splatter off the sockets
                                                         ­      of fishermen birds,
                                     who can no longer ignore all
                                     the puppy dogs and kitty cats canned
                                                          ­               in squeeze tubes.

Now every corner of this landscape--a puzzle-piece room
                                           designed to think in shades
                                           and seasonal plume dances.

The usual beautiful* late evening
has become clotted with hip hop Down's Syndrome
mixed with jazz Dual-Personality Disorder.

                                                   Vampire Hades' skull evacuated of ****** power,
                                                          ­      a scene of literal watercolor
                                                    wh­ere moods collage with paper rings

                   on their stubby tongues. An unfixed saturation,
                                                     ­         clean oils
                                                            ­   split
                                                           ­    like the parting of hair

                        Alice's pirate boy, her beauty is parched of tomorrow,
                                                       ­ a wolf for a blood-red moon
                 that works like a farmer
                          to      
                                                              th­e                       water.

                            Let us all that are wild
              quote the stormy truth that                          shifts the particles in space
                                             "It is all in the direction a flower grows,
                     educating a sea of doubtful faces--to the cruelty of nature
                                      Close the brutal mind,
                                                           ­       unless your eyes are flame-proof, Alice."

--It is yours to consume
but it is relatively us that belongs to the consequences--

                                                 ­  Churning coffee water,
                                            reenacting romantic bloodshed
                                    to addicts in attics
                                                          ­  --jostling war heroes
                                               back to this side of the looking glass.
--coming back to their tempest
                          of cremated breaths--a den with no one
                                                             ­   to sing with.
        Sad Alice,
   always sad Alice--mud on her face from             the Dead Sea's end
      of immortality           because Death is albino.


II

  
The top of the day,
                                                            ­              negative space
  has a dying voice        as it lies under the boot
                                       of the night sky  
                                                           ­      watching stars.
                                              "Simply tomorrow is right there
                                                above the mortals," Sweet Alice
                                                speaks, "To the many heavens
                                                      its­ overpopulating the fields."

       The earth needs its cotton blankets.
   Fresh air accents symptoms --dancing on slick gravel
  at 10:18 at night with a pale, pompous view of someone else's Paris.

Crocodile roads spit up by patterned archipelago drags,
updating the scream, "think more about going off the edge of hair and the last number
after twenty shots                         of anesthesia." The culture of Spanish sun denial devolves
         the fig tree
     novel delights.
99% of the fear that saturates the throats of people is a blonde tumor.
1% of the love is too passionate to contain the fires of field cotton.


III

         end of immortality
accepts her                 trying to escape her pirate boy
              but tones of nostalgia prevents the revival--a war with God, herself,

                                                       ­                 trying to escape looping Paradiso,
factory vents malfunctioning forth
                   the guts of Inferno.                     Purgartorio  plots on
                                                              ­          erased continents
                                                      ­   rolled down lamp shades/ everything is useful,
             waste nothing.

Republics spawned in damp pits stamp bargains on trust
     ringing each solo anthem as one: I saved you,
                                                            ­  feeble beast.
                                                          ­    I saved you,
                                                            ­  dear lonely and you didn't care.
                                                           ­    I reserved us both
                                                            ­  and you cast me back
                                                            ­  into Dante's imagination.
                                                    ­          I saved you,
                                                            ­  you feeble child
                                                           ­   and you burned
                                                              me­ with your
                                                              wo­rld.

     Weaving Alice, calm Alice lies in a dingy on the river Styx,
                                  cobwebs fit to her feet like rank shoes
           she gave her children when they were born malnourished
                                        ---starved of insurance money, mouths agape
for the silk heart of their father--an image of a moth in the shape of a human pelvis
                                                      with­ alligator mouths on the wing tips. They shared
                                      --Alice and him--those wings like scribbles tied together on chalkboards
                                                     ­                                 
                               ­                                       --places to venture--

Your Wonderlandia, she spells, a wasp's nest
                                  of combs
                                          in a hive locked
                              in with the others--concave atlas skies.

            Alice smiles with inebriated
   country boys
                          tossing comrades in the natural flow.
             Richly blonde Alice, admires the impression
                        of the night
                  once charred dreams,
                                               now volcanic forests.
              She glides on a dingy
              across the luscious joy
                             --lubricated veins in atheist's beliefs
                                 don't get lost here, just new places to venture.

Beneath malicious eternity, on the River Styx
                                                            ­        
               the boy she adores
                                    all of a sudden, she steals his hat,
looks into his double-barrel eyes,
                                       sees how sad
             she makes herself                  --like a mother tired of brushing
                                                                ­ her daughter's hair, looming tears
                                                           ­                                         extend beyond widows
                                                          ­                                          to the water.

                      The pirate boy says
            his friend isn't far up the river--she cries through her hand.

                               Hopeful Alice prays, smiling, hoping everyone goes to Wonderlandia.
                                             The pirate boy never finds his friend
                                              but keeps his promise
             and takes her away from Euphoria
                                                        ­       --the cranium loss still fresh.
Mike Essig Sep 2015
We are not quite like monks,
although we, too, sit.

A monk sits and seeks
to find nothing in nothing.

We sit to create
something out of something.

Things float in our minds:
childhood slights and successes,
puberty, hormones, pain,
our first fumbling *****,
our first bewildering wars,
colleges, conquests, rebuffs,
disappointments, jobs,
marriages, children, divorce:

all that has brought
us to this moment alone.

The monk sits in
deepening quiet,
unmoving in silence.

We sit, hand
caressing a pen,
a typewriter, a computer,
waiting upon experience,
hoping that
its loose images
and uncertain memories
will coalesce into words.

When they do (not always),
we call that a poem
and we call ourselves poets.

The monk devolves
into a nothing that is.
The poet crafts
a something that isn't.

Is the something
we have wrought
more than the nothing
that swallows the monks?

Or is it very the same:

not an attempt to touch
the depth of being,
but to become the depth
itself.

Not to be a magician,
but to become magick
itself.

To bow to the god
within ourselves
and allow it voice
or silence.

We both, in our ways,
do what we must do.

Namaste.

  ~mce
I meditate; I write poems. I sometimes wonder about the connection.
Pearson Bolt Aug 2015
we labor under an oppressive thumb
not realizing the very leaders
we exalt will use that power to
hold us down

we've armed them with
the greatest of weapons
blind conformity
empty apathy
unquestioning obedience
what we believe in is a puppet

as our so-called democracy devolves
we increase in callousness
masses designed with a singular purpose
to extinguish original thought

accept or die
embrace or be ostracized
belabor the point
that your purpose is to labor forever
another slave along the chain
another cog in the machine
bent-kneed
stooped before some
corporate conglomerate
a faceless superpower
pulling the strings behind the scenes

politicians bought and paid for
shouldering the burdens of the
Fortune 500 companies
who helped them purchase their office
beholden to back alley deals
and smoke and mirror gimmicks

artists traded rebellion for comfort
now they ply their craft for profit
to appease the brainwashed masses a
morally—and financially—bankrupt populace

they catalogue our every thought
metadata ensnared in the dragnet
mass surveillance a tool to bend the whims
of the people to their rulers

we **** black kids in Ferguson
as they walk down the middle of the street
shoot 'em down as the snack on skittles
and sip Arizona ice teas
they forbid us to feed the homeless
lock us in a jail cell if we dare to disobey
city ordinances designed to keep the
City Beautiful looking beautiful
but i see beyond the thin facade

expose war crimes
thanks for your service
Chelsea Manning
that'll be 35 years in federal penitentiary
hack a surveillance network spying on
activists and protesters
can't have that
that'll be 10 years at State
Jeremy Hammond
blow the whistle on the panopticon
thanks Edward Snowden
but we've grown to adore our own shackles

fear
24/7/365
fear this fear that
fear god fear death
fear Muslims fear blacks
just don't fear the rich white straight
males in their 4k suits and crooked smiles
pay the white-collar Wall St. Bankers no mind
the 1% who've left us all behind
as they lurk in the shadows
ruining everything

a fearful electorate will bow to the
whims of its masked dictatorship
and march without thought to the beat
of the war drums

**** them
**** all of them
ISIS Pakistan Iran Syria
all the Muslim savages in countries
whose names we can't even pronounce
render weapons to tyrannic despots
so we can pretend we
don't have blood on our own hands
torture extrajudicial assassination
extraordinary rendition drones bombing
civilians in record numbers
all cards we've stowed up our sleeves
in a war that is designed to never end
fight terrorism with terrorism
revenge not justice
but if our army is abusing children
then who the **** are the bad guys

confront the ambivalence that
roars like machine gun fire
violence is never the answer
and i refuse to stand by and watch
as we wreak havoc upon this earth

our leaders are liars
our gods are frauds
we're going to have to save ourselves

the answer does not rest above
a utopic afterlife in the clouds is a farce
we've been led like sheep to the slaughter
obedience and reverence have crippled us
if we want heaven
we'll have to raise hell

stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters
in direct action cooperatives
nonviolent civil disobedience
insurrection against the State
anarchy is the answer

beat your swords to plowshares
and seek peace
Tom McCone Nov 2013
open ended, carved under the sky,
before night arrests our bated breathing,
a long line pulls taut.
a single glimmer, thirty
seven degrees to the horizon,
devolves in absence; here,
a heaviness.
you tore the center of a
dripping plum clean to
ripples over fading plains,
corners of streets where
i stand, on one foot,
against this architect's second-best:
perfect still, bearings, city centre.
lost.

a kite string north, slight east,
the rotation of points demarcating
this pasture, a
long line becoming cycles,
tying tree-trunks like
your handwriting in switchblade font;
static inanimacy, a
song for nothing, a five
minute overhaul, the only
meaningful composition the
world will give up.
years.

taking up a pair of scissors,
you make soft moves;
kiss someone new a little longer
kiss someone new a little
kiss someone new,
smile,
skin as parchment,
fine paintings, forwarding addresses,
symbols glowing through the depths of night;
a candle, alight,
to have read you by.
a short line comes loose,
i fall down.
empty.

you fall asleep,
smile.
William de klerk Jul 2020
Isn't it ironic that
Silence screams so loud
we drown out the sound
and pray the voices pipe down
" they don't sound like me anymore
  they won't go away and each day
  a demented voice pulls me under
  and now I wonder...
which way is up?"

Isn't it ironic how
playing cards can cut
like a razor blade
and red dice rolling
become an evil eye that winks.
Does that cloth
on a tricky table
feel as soft
as the lining on a nearby coffin?

Isn't it ironic
when love's soft touch
devolves into lust
and broken hearts
disintegrate into rust,
when a silent embrace
becomes an empty bed
but that void only deepens
when we cheapen
our body and soul
to feel whole
for a mere moment.

Isn't it ironic
we want a world
so far from reality
we blur the one we have
as we snort, smoke and swallow
our problems away
only for them to return
on a much darker day.

A hundred vices
**** a thousand men
and in solidarity we stand.
Let one brave soul say
I have been bitten by these...
and more
so many more!
Let me lean on you brother
Let me comfort you sister
Let us stumble forward together!
Vices break so many, but grow in the dark as they take and take and don't ever give back. We stew in our sickness and stand alone instead of reaching out.
CM Rice Dec 2013
This seems a playful satire on the mighty Saltire
prewritten amidst a highland lowland silence.
In the hand of the wise-to Queen, or St. Andrew,
eternally akin to this 4-piece jigsaw'd island.
The actors publicly casted, professional amateurs,
notably despised an' yet a country's finest.

The setting old an' knew, new an' known, with
a neglected audience primed for mass evasion.
An' piecemeal parliaments, scrolls nor parchments,
have no place in this covert-of-sorts invasion.
For the stage be set with indebted goodwill,
through empty words in empty declarations.

The plot is thickening quick to a household broth,
of misdirection, miseducation an' artificial lie.
That binds the truth as if truth could be told,
of national strength safe in obvious disguise.
Common wealth paid for by the oblivious poor
man's pocket, pulling loose a threadbare tie.

Nae t'shakespeare'd lines, no to broken records,
No to smug derision of the true an' earnest,
Yes to insincerities that make you sober or worse,
that shine up their last of royal seal varnish.
No to sticky-finger-printed brass doorknobs,
of which for Scots to knuckle down an' burnish.

No to pious voices calling to brothers in arms,
leave this pound of flesh in vacuous debate.
Yes to monopolies of endless fields an' wind,
an' guards sat on a wall which have no gate.
Alas freedom remembered, stamped an' framed,
was never a win but loss to sovereign'd hate.

Left to aged members of past an' proven fable,
to cry the Nae's an' Yay's of a borrowed tongue,
to the masses still confused, still right thinking,
of who to believe an' who to defile. Now hung
out to dry the many years of engineered deflation,
left alone with answers still evolving, still young.

A year from now a collusive conclusion made,
to this ending – the poet an' playwrights success.
Devolving the ever-changing, deceptive blurbs,
to inveigh a reasoned No with a passionate Yes.
Leaves me mawkish for my country as it devolves,
An' I the fraternal gambler with only a flighty guess.

Recognise your flesh. Recognise the life you have.
Recognise the absurd use of this bargaining chip.
Social norms which press you heavy, all the time,
be they Catholic, Protestant, Tory, Liberal or hip,
Recognise you can discard them, this very moment,
An' become a leader of this Clydebank anchored ship.

Let no acid be sprayed unless to sting open the eyes
of the blind. Let no more our words become unseen.
Let no more the voices of hatred speak. An' so leave  
conflict where it belongs, for crowing minds to preen,
In the past for histrionics. No more of them an' us.
Step into freedom. Free, as you always have been.
Scotland is due to vote on its independence next year. Rather divisive decision to be making seeing as they have always had their independence in my eyes. For Tom McGrath (Credits go to him for the final 2 stanzas)
Phoenix Rising Jan 2015
I experience crippling anxiety
The people who feel high
Think it's easy to be high
Because they are high
And say to the low
To be high
But once I'm entangled
By the breathless thoughts
I am unable
To function

Depersonalization
Is crippling
And temporarily devolves me
Mike Essig Feb 2017
life is but a dream...*

Lithuanian speaking parrots
dangle alluringly toxic grapes,
but you breakfast on hyacinths
and suddenly turn cruel in April.
Seductively sleepy lidded women
grip you with invisible fangs
squeezing away any latent lust.
Your cat silently reads your will
licking his sharp, sodden chops.
The IRS sends you an inviting
prison manufactured Christmas card.
The car you can't drive finds a
new owner on Craig's List and
leaves you stranded and alone.
Unable to reach the grocery store,
you will choke on frozen burritos.
Your good cholesterol joins the plot,
turns bad, and conspires to ******.
Lowly earthworms dug for fishing
mutate into malevolent Blacks Mambas.
AARP hounds you to rejoin
no matter how many times you move.
Your high-speed Internet connection
devolves into a slow, taunting swamp.
Your toenails just won’t shut up.
The sun rises suspiciously late.
And you've only been awake an hour.
Could be a very long day.
Michael R Burch Mar 2020
I love you only because I love you
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
Between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you’re the one I love;
I hate you deeply, but hatred
Bends me all the more toward you, so that the measure of my variableness
Is that I do not see you, but love you blindly.

Perhaps January’s frigid light will consume my heart with its cruel rays,
robbing me of any hope of peace.

In this tragic plot, I am the one who dies,
Love’s only victim,
And I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, my Love, in fire and blood.

Keywords/Tags: Neruda, translation, Spanish, apathy, desire, ice, fire, blood, hate, hatred, blind, frigid, light, hope, peace, tragic, plot, Love's, victim



More Pablo Neruda Translations

You can crop all the flowers but you cannot detain spring.
―Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

While nothing can save us from death,
still love can redeem each breath.
―Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

As if you were set on fire from within,
the moon whitens your skin.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Please understand that when I awaken weeping
it's because I dreamed I was a lost child
searching the leaf-heaps for your hands in the darkness.
―Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I'm no longer in love with her, that's certain...
yet perhaps I love her still.
Love is so short, forgetting so long!
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



In all the languages of men only the poor will know your name.—Pablo Neruda



The Heights of Machu Picchu, Canto VIII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Martin Mc Carthy, who put me up to it

Ascend with me, my American love!

Let’s kiss these mysterious stones together!

The Urubamba’s torrential silver
lures pollen to fly from its golden chalice
while above this canyon’s unbroken silence
everything soars: the climbing grapevines’ fruitless branches,
the shopworn plants, each inflexible garland.

Come, elfin life, test your wings above the earth,
test the cold, crystalline air,
****** the embrittled emeralds aside,
test even these frigid waters, cascading from the icepacks.

Test love, lambent Love itself, until the night's sudden implosion
over the Andes' atlean peaks,
when, reeling on the reddening knees of dawn,
you feast your startled eyes on its snowblind offspring.

Oh Wilkamayu of the sonorous looms,
when you unleash your thunderbursts,
when you crazily rend your thunder’s skeins
leaving gauzy white clouds to bind wounded snow,
when your wild winds whip sheer cliffs into avalanches,
roaring as if to arouse the sky from its sleep,
what language will you awaken at last in the ear,
thus lately freed from your Andean inundations?

Who imprisoned the frigid lightning bolt,
left it chained to these Promethean heights,
scattered its glacial tears,
brandished its mercurial swords,
hammered out the threads of its war-torn stamens,
led it to this warrior's bower
then left it to lie in a rocky fissure?

What do your harried illuminations reveal,
your rebellious lightnings signal?
Must we travel inhibited by words?
Impeded by frozen syllables,
these dark languages, gold-brocaded banners,
fathomless mouths and conquered cries
arising from your silver arterial waters?

Who decapitates lily-like eyelids
from those come to observe the earth’s occupants?
Who scatters dead seeds
flung from your waterfall hands
only to atrophy here
into fossilized coal?

Who flings branches over precipices
only to bury our banal farewells?

On love, Love!, do not approach the boundaries;
avoid idle adoration of sunken heads;
nor let time exhaust all possibilities
in this strange abode of broken overtures;
nor think, between these cascading waters and sheer cliff walls,
to reclaim high mountains’ elevated airs,
nor the wind’s white laminations,
nor the blind canal’s guidance toward high cordilleras,
nor the dew’s brilliant solicitations;
but ascend, blossom by blossom, through the thickets,
clambering up the coiling serpent flung from the crags above.

From this escarpment zone of flint and forest,
from this emerald stardust broken by jungle clearings,
Mantur, the valley, emerges like a living creature
save for its eerie silence.

Ascend to my very being, to my own individual dawn,
even to this higher crown of solitudes.

This fallen kingdom survives in us nonetheless.

While racing across the Andes' sundial the condor's shadow
passes black as a marauder.



For now, I ask no more than the justice of eating.—Pablo Neruda



Religión en el Este (“Religion in the East”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Tom Merrill

I realized in Rangoon:
the gods were our enemies
as much as God;
alabaster gods elongated like white whales;
gilded gods gleaming like golden ears of corn;
serpentine gods coiling around the crime of being born;
naked detached buddhas
smiling enigmatically at cocktail parties,
contemplating pointless eternity
like Christ on his grotesque cross;
all of them capable of any atrocity,
of imposing their heaven upon us;
all armed with implements of torture, or death;
all demanding piety or, better yet, our blood;
avaricious gods imagined by men
to excuse their cowardice, or to conceal it;
gods everywhere, inescapable;
and the whole earth reeking of heaven,
for sale, like merchandise.



La Barcarola Termina (“The Watersong Ends”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is time, love, to sever the somber rose,
to shut off the stars, to re-bury the ashes in earth;
and then, in the insurrection of light, to awake with those who awoke,
lest we continue this dream of reaching the far shore of a sea without shores.



One Pillar
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

One pillar props up consolations,
so please don’t bother telling me anything!
Does the pale metalloid heal you, really?
I have a terrible fear of re-becoming an animal,
of the terrible anger that devolves men to boys.
And after so many words?



Soliloquio en Tinieblas (“Soliloquy at Twilight”)
from Estravagario, 1958
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don’t you know there’s no one in the streets
and no one inside the houses either? Only eyes in the windows.
If you lack someplace to sleep,
knock on a door and they’ll open it,
but only to a certain point,
and you’ll see that it’s cold inside,
that the house is empty
and wants nothing to do with you,
because your stories are worthless.
And if you suggest tenderness
the dog and cat will bite you.



Poesía (“Poetry”)
from Memorial de Isla Negra, 1964
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Something transpired in my soul,
a fit of fever or a flurry of wings,
after which I made my way,
deciphering that fire;
finally I wrote the first faint line,
pale, insubstantial, pure nonsense,
or perhaps the pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing;
then suddenly I saw
the heavens
revealed,
gates flung wide open.

Keywords/Tags: Pablo Neruda English Translations, Spanish Poems, Love Sonnets, Quotes, Epigrams, Machu Picchu
These are my English translations of poems by Pablo Neruda.
#neruda #translation #spanish #day #play #infinity #exquisite #visitor #machu #picchu


I love you only because I love you
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
Between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you're the one I love;
I hate you deeply, but hatred
Bends me all the more toward you, so that the measure of my variableness
Is that I do not see you, but love you blindly.

Perhaps January's frigid light will consume my heart with its cruel rays,
robbing me of any hope of peace.

In this tragic plot, I am the one who dies,
Love's only victim,
And I will die of love because I love you,
Because I love you, my Love, in fire and blood.



Love Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I do not love you like coral or topaz,
or the blazing hearth's incandescent white flame:
I love you as obscure things are loved in the dark,
secretly, in shadows, unnamed.

I love you like shrubs that refuse to bloom
while pregnant with the radiance of mysterious flowers;
now thanks to your love an earthy fragrance
lives dimly in my body's odors.

I love you without knowing how, when, why or where;
I love you forthrightly, without complications or care:
I love you this way because I know no other.

Here, where "I" no longer exists, nor "you"...
so close that your hand on my chest is my own,
so close that your eyes close gently on my dreams.



Every Day You Play
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Every day you play with Infinity's rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water.
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp tightly
like a cornucopia, every day, between my hands...



Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.

I long for your liquid laughter,
for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
I lust for your fingernails' pale marbles.
I want to devour your ******* like almonds, whole.

I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
to lick your eyelashes' flickering shade.

I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
seeking your heart's scorching heat
like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.



The Book of Questions
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Is the rose ****
or is that just how she dresses?

Why do trees conceal
their spectacular roots?

Who hears the confession
of the getaway car?

Is there anything sadder
than a train standing motionless in the rain?



In El Salvador, Death
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Death still surveils El Salvador.
The blood of murdered peasants has never clotted;
time cannot congeal it,
nor does the rain erase it from the roads.
Fifteen thousand were machine-gunned dead
by Martinez, the murderer.
To this day the coppery taste of blood still flavors
the land, bread and wine of El Salvador.



If You Forget Me
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I need you to know one thing...
You know
how it goes:
if I gaze up at the glowing moon,
if observe the blazing autumn's reddening branches from my window,
if I touch the impalpable ash of the charred log's wrinkled body...
everything returns me to you,
as if everything that exists
―all aromas, sights, solids―
were small boats
sailing toward those isles of yours that await me.

However...
if little by little you stop loving me
then I shall stop loving you, little by little.

And if you suddenly
forget me,
do not bother to investigate,
for I shall have immediately
forgotten you
also.

If you think my love strange and mad―
this whirlwind of streaming banners
gusting through me,
so that you elect to leave me at the shore
where my heart lacks roots,
just remember that, on that very day,
at that very hour,
I shall raise my arms
and my roots will sail off
to find some more favorable land.

But
if each day
and every hour,
you feel destined to be with me,
if you greet me with implacable sweetness,
and if each day
and every hour
flowers blossom on your lips to entice me, ...
then ah my love,
oh my only, my own,
all that fire will be reinfernoed in me
and nothing within me will be extinguished or forgotten;
my love will feed on your love, my beloved,
and as long as you live it will be me in your arms...
as long as you never leave mine.



Sonnet XLV
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don't wander far away, not even for a day, because―
how can I explain? A day is too long...
and I'll be waiting for you, like a man in an empty station
where the trains all stand motionless.

Don't leave me, my dear, not even for an hour, because―
then despair's raindrops will all run blurrily together,
and the smoke that drifts lazily in search of a home
will descend hazily on me, suffocating my heart.

Darling, may your lovely silhouette never dissolve in the surf;
may your lashes never flutter at an indecipherable distance.
Please don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because then you'll have gone far too far
and I'll wander aimlessly, amazed, asking all the earth:
Will she ever return? Will she spurn me, dying?



My Dog Died
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My dog died;
so I buried him in the backyard garden
next to some rusted machine.

One day I'll rejoin him, over there,
but for now he's gone
with his shaggy mane, his crude manners and his cold, clammy nose,
while I, the atheist who never believed
in any heaven for human beings,
now believe in a paradise I'm unfit to enter.

Yes, I somehow now believe in a heavenly kennel
where my dog awaits my arrival
wagging his tail in furious friendship!

But I'll not indulge in sadness here:
why bewail a companion
who was never servile?

His friendship was more like that of a porcupine
preserving its prickly autonomy.

His was the friendship of a distant star
with no more intimacy than true friendship called for
and no false demonstrations:
he never clambered over me
coating my clothes with mange;
he never assaulted my knee
like dogs obsessed with ***.

But he used to gaze up at me,
giving me the attention my ego demanded,
while helping this vainglorious man
understand my concerns were none of his.

Aye, and with those bright eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd gaze up at me
contentedly;
it was a look he reserved for me alone
all his entire sweet, gentle life,
always merely there, never troubling me,
never demanding anything.

Aye, and often I envied his energetic tail
as we strode the shores of Isla Negra together,
in winter weather, wild birds swarming skyward
as my golden-maned friend leapt about,
supercharged by the sea's electric surges,
sniffing away wildly, his tail held *****,
his face suffused with the salt spray.

Joy! Joy! Joy!
As only dogs experience joy
in the shameless exuberance
of their guiltless spirits.

Thus there are no sad good-byes
for my dog who died;
we never once lied to each other.

He died, he's gone, I buried him;
that's all there is to it.



Tonight I will write the saddest lines
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Tonight I will write the saddest lines.
I will write, for example, "The night is less bright
and a few stars shiver in the distance
as I remember her unwarranted light..."

Tonight I will write her the saddest lines:
that I loved her as she loved me too, sometimes,
all those long, lonely nights when I held her tight
and filled her ears with indecipherable rhymes...

Then she loved me too, as I also loved her,
compelled by the spell of her enormous eyes.
Tonight I will write her the saddest lines
as I ponder love's death and our mutual crimes.

Outside I hear night―silent, cold, dark, immense―
as these delicate words fall, useless as dew.
Oh, what does it matter that love came to naught
if love was false, or perhaps even true?

And yet I hear songs being sung in the distance.
How can I forget her, so soon since I lost her?
I seek to regain her, somehow bring her closer.
But my heart has been blinded; she will not appear!

Now moonlight and starlight whiten dark trees.
We also are ghosts, by love's failing light.
My love has failed me, but how I once loved her!
My voice... this cursed wind... what use to recite?

Another's. She will soon be another's.
Her body, her voice, her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her! And why should I love her
when love is sad, short, mad, fickle, unwise?

Because of cold nights we clung through so closely,
I'm not satisfied to know she is gone.
And while I must end this hell I now suffer,
It's sad to remember all love left undone.

Keywords/Tags: Pablo Neruda, Spanish, Translation, Love, Sonnet, Passion, Desire, Romantic, Despair, Sadness, Dog
These are my English translations of Spanish poems by Pablo Neruda, including "The Heights of Machu Picchu" and several love sonnets and epigrams.
Gabrielle Mar 2010
azure eyes with tinges of grey
worn from a dance with the night
hair wild, could be wind-swept

but no, only bed-swept
through the tossing and turning
her hair strangles and tangles itself

the sun does not wait for her to wake
she waits for the sun, achingly
as the dark slowly devolves to light

knowingly the pattern repeats and continues on
the familiar sequence brings a sick sort of comfort
she needs something to smile about anyway,

"and it's always nice to see the sun rise."
C Jacobine Oct 2013
There are just words
that resonate, meaningfully,
-as if they have meaning-
from the echo within my skull
to the entrance within my soul.

And to you who infers,
who proclaims the righteous totality
and splendor of connotation
under the guise of one's own God,
within and without,
I thank you for your consideration,
for finding your words in mine.

For when 'you' and 'I' are swapped,
when truth is but a sound
and notions dissolve into the echoes of life,
this will be but a piece of paper,
marked up crudely
from clandestine forethought
into a portrait of emotions, unvisible.

Should I share my tears onto this page
it could have no more significance
than the weakest tear in the fabric
as it, too, devolves into brusque indifference.

When the thoughts have decayed
and I find myself a stranger to this text,
I will know its meaning extinct
but for its interpretations
Herb Apr 2019
For better or worse
It's the omen's curse
No use to rehearse
Fortunes in reverse

Bad tidings are loose
The world's neck in a noose
For those too obtuse
Explanation, no use

Ashes on your head
The enemy is Dread
By Ignorance it is fed
To Mystery it is wed

Pray if you must
Your dreams are a bust
They lay in the dust
Decaying to rust

There's only bad luck
In Limbo you're stuck
Feet mired in the muck
Reality has struck

Will misfortunes lift?
As the heavens shift
The Sands of Time sift
To seal the Dark Rift

Earth still revolves
The future evolves
And danger devolves
As lunacy resolves

Wait out the pain
Full moon will wane
Insanity turns sane
Peace you'll regain
Lyzi Diamond Aug 2013
With heavy breath, I bring
pen to page and finger to string
and hold left hand over right, to steady
my shaking wrist as I tremble,
the echo of your voice resonating
permeating
bouncing off every sinewy fiber,
ankles and hips and lungs and heart
beating for you.

I try to write of other things—
of clouds and car crashes and
mysterious men in dark suits with trombone cases and silencers,
or big whaling ships off the coast of Japan,
cold lights singing through marine mist—
but the trains of thought all lead to your
"I love you,"
to your
"I want you,"
to your
"I'm all yours."

The lyrical cadence is tired,
reminiscent of the classics and
traversing paths well-traveled.
The major keys with clean sound—
no reverb, no filter, no distortion—
are boring and basic,
and the vocal sickly sweet
and the floor toms empty
and the ride cymbal whispering
shhhhhhhh
over a cavalcade of harmonics
in a complete circle of fifths.

You are the fairy tale,
the "once upon a time"
and the "happily ever after"
that feel fabricated passing through the lips of others,
but more lucid than taste and smell when
falling through yours
mine
ours
pressed
pushed
touch
close.

It all devolves
into tangled limbs
bright colors
and whispered, made up words.
The ones that exist simply won't do.

I write every song
every single ******* song
for you.
These are English translations of Spanish poems by Pablo Neruda. There are also English translations of Pablo Neruda quotes and epigrams.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971 and is generally considered to be one of the world's best poets. Indeed, he was called "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language" by Gabriel García Márquez.

Neruda always wrote in green ink, the color of esperanza (hope).



Love! Love until the night implodes!—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



You can crop all the flowers but you cannot detain spring.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Every Day You Play (Excerpt)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Every day you play with Infinity’s rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water!
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp lovingly
like a cornucopia, every day, with ecstatic hands ...



As if you were set on fire from within,
the moon whitens your skin.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



The Book of Questions
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Is the rose ****
or is that just how she dresses?

Why do trees conceal
their spectacular roots?

Who hears the confession
of the getaway car?

Is there anything sadder
than a train standing motionless in the rain?



While nothing can save us from death,
still love can redeem each breath.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



In El Salvador, Death
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Death still surveils El Salvador.
The blood of murdered peasants has never clotted;
time cannot congeal it,
nor does the rain erase it from the roads.
Fifteen thousand were machine-gunned dead
by Martinez, the murderer.
To this day the coppery taste of blood still flavors
the land, bread and wine of El Salvador.



Please understand that when I awaken weeping
it's because I dreamed I was a lost child
searching the leaf-heaps for your hands in the darkness.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Love Sonnet LXVI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you’re the one I love;
I hate you deeply, but hatred makes me implore you all the more
so that in my inconstancy
I do not see you, but love you blindly.

Perhaps January’s frigid light
will consume my heart with its cruel rays,
robbing me of the key to contentment.

In this tragic plot, I ****** myself
and I will die loveless because I love you,
because I love you, my Love, in fire and in blood.



I'm no longer in love with her, that's certain ...
yet perhaps I love her still.
Love is so short, forgetting so long!
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Love Sonnet XI
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.

I long for your liquid laughter,
for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
I lust for your fingernails' pale marbles.
I want to devour your ******* like almonds, whole.

I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
to lick your eyelashes' flickering shade.

I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
seeking your heart's scorching heat
like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.



I own my own darkness, alone.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I alone own my darkness.—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch



Love Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I do not love you like coral or topaz,
or the blazing hearth's incandescent white flame;
I love you like phantoms embraced in the dark ...
secretly, in shadows, unrevealed & unnamed.

I love you like bushes that refuse to bloom
while pregnant with the radiance of mysterious flowers;
now, thanks to your love, an earthy fragrance
lives dimly in my body's odors.

I love you without knowing—how, when, why or where;
I love you forthrightly, without complications or care;
I love you this way because I know no other.

Here, where "I" no longer exists ... so it seems ...
so close that your hand on my chest is my own,
so close that your eyes close gently on my dreams.



I like for you to be still: it’s as if you were absent;
then you hear me from far away, yet my voice fails to touch you.
—Pablo Neruda “Me Gustas Cuando Callas” translation by Michael R. Burch



If You Forget Me
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I need you to know one thing ...

You know
how it goes:
if I gaze up at the glowing moon,
if observe the blazing autumn’s reddening branches from my window,
if I touch the impalpable ash of the charred log’s wrinkled body ...
everything returns me to you,
as if everything that exists
—all aromas, sights, solids—
were small boats
sailing toward those isles of yours that await me.

However ...
if little by little you stop loving me
then I shall stop loving you, little by little.

And if you suddenly
forget me,
do not bother to investigate,
for I shall have immediately
forgotten you
also.

If you think my love strange and mad—
this whirlwind of streaming banners
gusting through me,
so that you elect to leave me at the shore
where my heart lacks roots,
just remember that, on that very day,
at that very hour,
I shall raise my arms
and my roots will sail off
to find some more favorable land.

But
if each day
and every hour,
you feel destined to be with me,
if you greet me with implacable sweetness,
and if each day
and every hour
flowers blossom on your lips to entice me, ...
then ah my love,
oh my only, my own,
all that fire will be reinfernoed in me
and nothing within me will be extinguished or forgotten;
my love will feed on your love, my beloved,
and as long as you live it will be me in your arms ...
as long as you never leave mine.



Laughter is the soul's language.—Pablo Neruda



Sonnet XLV
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don't wander far away, not even for a day, because—
how can I explain? A day is too long ...
and I’ll be waiting for you, like a man in an empty station
where the trains all stand motionless.

Don't leave me, my dear, not even for an hour, because—
then despair’s raindrops will all run blurrily together,
and the smoke that drifts lazily in search of a home
will descend hazily on me, suffocating my heart.

Darling, may your lovely silhouette never dissolve in the surf;
may your lashes never flutter at an indecipherable distance.
Please don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because then you'll have gone far too far
and I'll wander aimlessly, amazed, asking all the earth:
Will she ever return? Will she spurn me, dying?



I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.—Pablo Neruda



My Dog Died
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My dog died;
so I buried him in the backyard garden
next to some rusted machine.

One day I'll rejoin him, over there,
but for now he's gone
with his shaggy mane, his crude manners and his cold, clammy nose,
while I, the atheist who never believed
in any heaven for human beings,
now believe in a paradise I'm unfit to enter.

Yes, I somehow now believe in a heavenly kennel
where my dog awaits my arrival
wagging his tail in furious friendship!

But I'll not indulge in sadness here:
why bewail a companion
who was never servile?

His friendship was more like that of a porcupine
preserving its prickly autonomy.

His was the friendship of a distant star
with no more intimacy than true friendship called for
and no false demonstrations:
he never clambered over me
coating my clothes with mange;
he never assaulted my knee
like dogs obsessed with ***.

But he used to gaze up at me,
giving me the attention my ego demanded,
while helping this vainglorious man
understand my concerns were none of his.

Aye, and with those bright eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd gaze up at me
contentedly;
it was a look he reserved for me alone
all his entire sweet, gentle life,
always merely there, never troubling me,
never demanding anything.

Aye, and often I envied his energetic tail
as we strode the shores of Isla Negra together,
in winter weather, wild birds swarming skyward
as my golden-maned friend leapt about,
supercharged by the sea's electric surges,
sniffing away wildly, his tail held *****,
his face suffused with the salt spray.

Joy! Joy! Joy!
As only dogs experience joy
in the shameless exuberance
of their guiltless spirits.

Thus there are no sad good-byes
for my dog who died;
we never once lied to each other.

He died, he's gone, I buried him;
that's all there is to it.



Let us forget with generosity those who cannot love us.—Pablo Neruda



Tonight I will write the saddest lines
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Tonight I will write the saddest lines.
I will write, for example, “The night is less bright
and a few stars shiver in the distance
as I remember her unwarranted light ...”

Tonight I will write her the saddest lines:
that I loved her as she loved me too, sometimes,
all those long, lonely nights when I held her tight
and filled her ears with indecipherable rhymes ...

Then she loved me too, as I also loved her,
compelled by the spell of her enormous eyes.
Tonight I will write her the saddest lines
as I ponder love’s death and our mutual crimes.

Outside I hear night—silent, cold, dark, immense—
as these delicate words fall, useless as dew.
Oh, what does it matter that love came to naught
if love was false, or perhaps even true?

And yet I hear songs being sung in the distance.
How can I forget her, so soon since I lost her?
I seek to regain her, somehow bring her closer.
But my heart has been blinded; she will not appear!

Now moonlight and starlight whiten dark trees.
We also are ghosts, by love’s failing light.
My love has failed me, but how I once loved her!
My voice ... this cursed wind ... what use to recite?

Another’s. She will soon be another’s.
Her body, her voice, her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her! And why should I love her
when love is sad, short, mad, fickle, unwise?

Because of cold nights we clung through so closely,
I’m not satisfied to know she is gone.
And while I must end this hell I now suffer,
It’s sad to remember all love left undone.

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.—Pablo Neruda



Religión en el Este (“Religion in the East”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Tom Merrill

I realized in Rangoon:
the gods were our enemies
as much as God;
alabaster gods elongated like white whales;
gilded gods gleaming like golden ears of corn;
serpentine gods coiling around the crime of being born;
naked detached buddhas
smiling enigmatically at cocktail parties,
contemplating pointless eternity
like Christ on his grotesque cross;
all of them capable of any atrocity,
of imposing their heaven upon us;
all armed with implements of torture, or death;
all demanding piety or, better yet, our blood;
avaricious gods imagined by men
to excuse their cowardice, or to conceal it;
gods everywhere, inescapable;
and the whole earth reeking of heaven,
for sale, like merchandise.



In all the languages of men only the poor will know your name.—Pablo Neruda



The Heights of Macchu Picchu, Canto VIII
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

for Martin Mc Carthy, who put me up to it

Ascend with me, my American love!

Let’s kiss these mysterious stones together!

The Urubamba’s torrential silver
lures pollen to fly from its golden chalice
while above this canyon’s unbroken silence
everything soars: the climbing grapevines’ fruitless branches,
the shopworn plants, each inflexible garland.

Come, elfin life, test your wings above the earth,
test the cold, crystalline air,
****** the embrittled emeralds aside,
test even these frigid waters, cascading from the icepacks.

Test love, lambent Love itself, until the night's sudden implosion
over the Andes' atlean peaks,
when, reeling on the reddening knees of dawn,
you feast your startled eyes on its snowblind offspring.

Oh Wilkamayu of the sonorous looms,
when you unleash your thunderbursts,
when you crazily rend your thunder’s skeins
leaving gauzy white clouds to bind wounded snow,
when your wild winds whip sheer cliffs into avalanches,
roaring as if to arouse the sky from its sleep,
what language will you awaken at last in the ear,
thus lately freed from your Andean inundations?

Who imprisoned the frigid lightning bolt,
left it chained to these Promethean heights,
scattered its glacial tears,
brandished its mercurial swords,
hammered out the threads of its war-torn stamens,
led it to this warrior's bower
then left it to lie in a rocky fissure?

What do your harried illuminations reveal,
your rebellious lightnings signal?
Must we travel inhibited by words?
Impeded by frozen syllables,
these dark languages, gold-brocaded banners,
fathomless mouths and conquered cries
arising from your silver arterial waters?

Who decapitates lily-like eyelids
from those come to observe the earth’s occupants?
Who scatters dead seeds
flung from your waterfall hands
only to atrophy here
into fossilized coal?

Who flings branches over precipices
only to bury our banal farewells?

On love, Love!, do not approach the boundaries;
avoid idle adoration of sunken heads;
nor let time exhaust all possibilities
in this strange abode of broken overtures;
nor think, between these cascading waters and sheer cliff walls,
to reclaim high mountains’ elevated airs,
nor the wind’s white laminations,
nor the blind canal’s guidance toward high cordilleras,
nor the dew’s brilliant solicitations;
but ascend, blossom by blossom, through the thickets,
clambering up the coiling serpent flung from the crags above.

From this escarpment zone of flint and forest,
from this emerald stardust broken by jungle clearings,
Mantur, the valley, emerges like a living creature
save for its eerie silence.

Ascend to my very being, to my own individual dawn,
even to this higher crown of solitudes.

This fallen kingdom survives in us nonetheless.

While racing across the Andes' sundial the condor's shadow
passes black as a marauder.



For now, I ask no more than the justice of eating.—Pablo Neruda



La Barcarola Termina (“The Watersong Ends”)
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

It is time, love, to sever the somber rose,
to shut off the stars, to re-bury the ashes in earth;
and then, in the insurrection of light, to awake with those who awoke,
lest we continue this dream of reaching the far shore of a sea without shores.



One Pillar
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

One pillar props up consolations,
so please don’t bother telling me anything!
Does the pale metalloid heal you, really?
I have a terrible fear of re-becoming an animal,
of the terrible anger that devolves men to boys.
And after so many words?



Soliloquio en Tinieblas (“Soliloquy at Twilight”)
from Estravagario, 1958
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Don’t you know there’s no one in the streets
and no one inside the houses either? Only eyes in the windows.
If you lack someplace to sleep,
knock on a door and they’ll open it,
but only to a certain point,
and you’ll see that it’s cold inside,
that the house is empty
and wants nothing to do with you,
because your stories are worthless.
And if you suggest tenderness
the dog and cat will bite you.

*

Poesía (“Poetry”)
from Memorial de Isla Negra, 1964
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Something transpired in my soul,
a fit of fever or a flurry of wings,
after which I made my way,
deciphering that fire;
finally I wrote the first faint line,
pale, insubstantial, pure nonsense,
or perhaps the pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing;
then suddenly I saw
the heavens
revealed,
gates flung wide open.

Keywords/Tags: Pablo Neruda English Translations, Spanish Poems, Love Sonnets, Quotes, Epigrams, Macchu Picchu
These are English Translations of Spanish poems by Pablo Neruda, translated by Michael R. Burch.
Sometimes Starr Apr 2018
I'm so many folds deep.

It's when I listen to Soupy's songs
Or when those songs turn my attention to Ginsberg
And moments like that

That's when I realize how stuck in myself I am.

I want to write about someone dear to me. And it bothers me that I don't do that naturally.

I want to write about my generation. Something other than me.

I'm so detached from things, and only cultured in some random patches of obsession. I try to fix that. I am a little slow at it. And yet I witness from myself bursts of creative brilliance. It happens. . .

It is sometimes very hard to be creative. I think O. Henry said something about having to leave the house.

Who and what is dear to me? I miss Brian. We don't talk at all anymore, and we used to be best friends. I dont even remember what I said when I was depressed. What was that, two years ago?

I'm stuck on someone I haven't talked to in over 4 years. That's pretty horrible.

I really need to try to be more positive with my mom, even if she is having a rough day, because she just seems so sad even when she's happy. And I ****** my parent's lives up so terribly.

So now that I've done that I get to tell you more about me and why I'm so important,
I could do so many things with my brain,
I watch all these educational videos.

But I vandalized a train station one night in 2016 when my parents called the cops on me for throwing my brothers ihome and i talked to the cops and then tried to bike off the anger after.

But the tires were slashed and I got so mad and broke this very expensive electric sign at the train station as well as a store front window and a windshield of a parked car with rocks.

So then I did 5 months in jail and I was charged with a felony, but if I do this mental health court its not a felony, and it is a year and a half and every day i never know if I will have a drug test which takes lots of time to do because I take the bus a couple towns over for them

So that lasts for at least another year but my restitution is $45,000 and I will go on regular probation until that is paid off

So I'm like, pretty smart and I want to go to school but I'm not sure if I should do that or just try other things and be creative.

I dont know I've literally been studying receptor pharmacology of cells recently for kicks. And I love physics. I dont know. Music is my main love. I don't think its smart to major in music. Ugh, I'm 23

I dont know why I'm posting this I'm not trying but I want you to read it its like mean of me to want you to understand this but not even be trying.

I just want to be able to do things again, like drive and afford things and work a regular job. I feel like I'm in hell but I know I should be thankful? I dont know. I wish I were a famous musician.

I probably dont seem intelligent to you at all. I'm actually pretty intelligent but it is in specific ways, I'm like a lower tier genius. I'm just losing my ****. That got auto corrected to shot and now I'm sad.
atticus Sep 2016
skin me alive, i beg of you to do so
take off my skin layer by layer, laying it in acid
so it devolves, leaving nothing behind
i want you to them remove my limbs
piece by piece
throw them into the water so they float away, to find a better home
i want you to break every bone that makes up my skeleton
why you ask?
so you can no longer break my heart
i want you take my organs and eat them
so you can taste the pain you caused me
and lastly, take my blood
put in a jar and freeze it so it lasts forever
that way you always know what you did to me
you made my blood spill all over the floor
when you said good bye
for i no longer wanted to be a human
i no longer wanted to exist
so i beg of you
to take me a part
treating her sadly
in his dull pride admired

when his innocence, inoculated
with sour spores,
devolves into thick hides
jaded attitudes
and glazed gaze
raised in the house,
to only look in at the garden
via viewports distorted
Stevie Ray Mar 2021
No-Thingness

Everything devolves into structuredness because all things revert to singularity. To one entitity. It reverts to a single point of energy charged with infinite potential and pure conciousness.
An All-being dissolved of any structure and definition giving meaning to the No-Thingness inherent in the fabric of all existence.
We are omniscience expressed through a fragmented incomplete experience. More expressed through lesser, yet without this,
potential wouldn't come into fruition. Understanding comes with defining structures painted on the empty canvas of awareness. When we cease to paint, the color of awareness transforms emptiness into spaciousness. That's why through silence we can experience contentment in being. The practice is awareness without understanding.To understand that we are awareness without practice. Effortless. Duality is our illusion, our bounderies are imaginary. We only perceive the paradoxical expression of reality.
Like the notion of distance in the definition of interconnectivity.
Wholeness is incomprehensible presence.
It is the rigidity of our awareness that prevents us from flowing into it. Take water poured into existence, yet it takes the shape of an imaginary bowl. Held together by the tension of it's own convictions. It firmly believes in it's seperation and individuality.
Convinced of it's own shape, it does so against ironically impossible odds. It forgot it's place within No-Thingness yet that does not mean it's seperation. It merely means it does not recognize itself as the wholeness it perceives.
Mark Feb 2020
I don't deny; love in heart is life's force
For procreation how we need love more:
Would solve with love how hate does cause divorce
Between own mind and lover's loving core.
Is just then one to love their self alone
To spend their days that selfishness revolves
And hermit nor hermess need none atone
Before their own and lover's sin devolves.
Let here from my experience so lend:
At first does single-hood live single's dream
But love still loves in shadows love does send
'Till even they have taken voice to scream:

And call upon your lonesomeness apart
Than what in love revives within your heart!
giofuellos Jan 2019
When words are not enough
To express our anger and disgust;
When no words profound
Can unriddle the inescapable secrecy
Of our grief and sorrow
Perpetrated by the unjust;
When meter and rhyme
Devolves into illiterate cacophonies;
When our voices are lost in the byzantine corridors of the abyss;
When our crystalline tears that pierces the sacred ground does not nourish life;
Then our actions must remain true
As conduits of our truths, our emotions, and our insatiable passion to live and breathe the same august air, and share the bounty of the sacred soil and seas;
To collectively enjoy the warmth of the flames as it slowly devours the firewood
Crackling in the serene silence of the long night;
When words are not enough then may this eternal dance keep the bonfire of life burning through the ages
Like Jupiter's raging storm,
Let the red splotches of dust be scattered through the clouds and start the clockwork of eternity, to free us and forever disquiet our hearts!
May the flames of the revolution burn stronger and brighter. Viva CPP-NPA-NDFP!
Lily Priest Jan 2021
The burn, icy in the throat
Flaring up constellations as it goes,
Spitting up supernovas that blast in puffs
of grey air and curl into the ether,
like an afterthought.
Tongue tied, lightly listless in the snow
Glowing white with the wonder
Of nothingness in the mind.
Denied the deafness,
Dreary doubts and thoughts of morning, where sunlit and blinded fumbling take hold,
Knowing devolves, unknown.

Synapses sizzle like taut guitar strings,
Plucked with the pining of the in-between,
The nameless dimension
Where everything is and isn't.
No, box.
No cat.
Schrodinger, doffs, tips cap and theory
To the bountiful bleakness of being.
Explanations die,
Shoot stars behind the redness and the glassy-eyed smile.
Words fail, burnt up frozen
And flailing in their mediocrity.
Silence spins, giggles fill its spaces
And gravity grounds the freedom.
Strangerous Feb 2023
To say “I love you” is equivalent
to saying I breathe air.

                                         Such sustenance
as I derive from oxygen devolves
so liberally, so reflexively upon me,
yet were I deprived of atmosphere,
the words “I breathe” would not avail to fill
my lungs with what they need, nor would the words
“I am a fish” convert my lungs to gills.

Ethereal by nature, not by choice,
I’m bound to love you notwithstanding my voice.
© 1991 by Jack Morris

Hear the song on SoundCloud:
soundcloud.com/therealjackstrange/i-breathe-you
KorbydAngyle Oct 2022
If faith has betrayed me, my entire life... the entrusted dynamic varying between munificence

or lethargic catatonic pain

Lays innocuous clasps, brazen and denounced, assert  juxtaposition sans identity

the indemnity a semblance of soul redemption's cowls

   upon the call of the unclear

Lost identity flushing away my right to palpable stalwart meditations...

And the little worth of a day's work, lays only callous the thoughts of future redemptions

What trust is there?- In the guild of fate, the guise of champions and warriors?

Can bereft cessation of  continuing thoughts, vain and in claustrophobic retention -....?

Quell what small path of hope truly lays before me



The scratching arms and demon's claws

Shield resounding hope and prey on what little

clarification lays before me...

In the center of desolation is a slowly churning series of events

When the caustic remembrance of distant hope came and went...

And falling upon an enslaved cross, of all defiled creatures in eternity



I fear the angels have turned their back and beckon with laughs mocking me

Simple requiem, safe courted satisfactions denied, amassing principle

Caught by  Godless precipice, doughty subjective paucity and impure

  classlessness devolves into brash resuming horrors

That the best of me

Was the first

Yet again the least to fight and prove

What can faith redeem?
Ayn Jul 2020
Spiders weaving golden threads,
Through our dreams
And around our silent heads.
The life running through our hair,
Attracting dreamweavers to our minds.

But all it takes is a bit of a bite,
And the once golden thread,
devolves to red,
And the once lavish life,
Disintegrates to lead.
Wonthelimar
Casus Infernalis  
Volumen I



Ultramundis Altior Caelum


Índex


Page      3 / Episode I…………………..Wonthelimar / Styx

Page    15 / Episode II………………….900 Hundred of Darkness

Page    29 / Episode III…………………Casus Infernalis / Lete

Page    35 / Episode IV……………….....Marielle meus Spiritus

Page    40 / Episode V…………………..Ultramundis / Acheron

Page    72 / Episode VI………………….Ibics Ring / Phlegethon

Page    85 / Episode VII………………....Wonthelimar / Cocytus



“Ultramundis Casus Infernalis”


Episode I
Wonthelimar / Styx

Wonthelimar, holding Persephone's hand, crosses the abyss of the Styx, the vast shore where he will find Persephone's sacred groves; he will discern towering poplars and willows bearing prophesied, dying fruits. There he will dock his boat on the shore of the most hidden ocean, heading for the drenched oikos of Hades; there in the Acheron the river of Hamas and the river of lamentations meet, gushing forth in the Styx, which gather me at the foot of a rock and its roaring waters, there My Marielle rests, bound with willow branches, tied to her brushwood with Beelzebub's twigs.

When the ship arrived from the confines of the abysmal ocean, in the city of the Cimmerians, where the sun never rises and is shrouded in darkness, I will cautiously follow one of the tributaries that lead me to the Underworld that Circe had indicated to me.

From Erebus at that time will emerge the souls deprived of life, betrothed, young men, long-lived with a thousand sorrows, tender Muses gone there with their first condemnation; many Hoplite soldiers wounded by bronze spears, warriors who gave their lives in battle with their bleeding Xiphos. They approached in a great multitude, each from one side with a horrifying clamor. I, Wonthelimar, seized by the livid fear of the Infernalis, ordered my steed to follow the points of the dark sunset that are gathering the cattle that are slaughtered by cruel bronze, resting in the world, without letting them reach the torrid blood until speaking with Tiresias, towards the blind canons of my prophet of Thebes.

It would preexist the Ultramundis and the contingency that teleported it from thousands of years stored in its ******* Godmothership; such a Dryad that, asleep in the gravitational graphics that it held out to them from the annals of the 5,000s, of cultured ruggedness and nefarious slumber that transported them in shreds of the figurative tributary, coveting to awaken its Celestine part of an extreme, strenuous suffering from the dormant, potentially expectant Paleolithic. They flow back from an arid awakening of their doomed and inert constituent in sniffed-out, univocal belligerent virginal materials, which, spirited, were jealous from the steep decanted cliffs, climbing into Celestial Paradises that were opening, sad-faced, gurgling in imbalances of lushness and pertinent shyness. Brilliant columns and balustrades will glide through such saturated imbalances and river strata, linking to contracted biological messages… not yet incited! Totally far from the fleeting tremor of gravity and its lifeless trance its lucid revival choked, dozing in juxtaposition against the lap that converged between the blinded flanks of the eyelid of stone azure and earthy silicon, a tangle of lost silences and seas of the braided talented ellipse of the stunned darkness.

Wonthelimar awakens from a thunderous dawn and from the poisonous cessation of its frightened period, just as the favorite Ibex had been in its line of disoriented role. Thunders in poorly delayed have illuminated sufferings that are born from his shoulders barely able to go intuiting to harass him and go conceiving of reuniting him from gestated pastures, and forces to meet with the sustainable humanity of the Canonized Petrified Mammoth or of huge colonies of Vampires that will fight on the bed of a dim Jurassic light decimated by ruined Corinthian dynasties.

Never will there be left behind more sackcloth or midwives who will go to mourn him, nor caustic reasons from the anti-specimen that cautiously devolves from the fleeting Sauter like a skilled Vampire who appears ankylosed from his biomechanics. Lightning flashes radiated between swollen pilasters and ideologies from a stuttering with nuances of a compromising Being struck down, incontinent to deprecate, drinking from the scented threshold between the stench and hieratic anabaptized waters of blunt skilled hands and uncrossed consecrations that visited him, falling from an animal profile, like a divergent ruler in his frivolous, cloying grotto of a defective past, aspiring to issue a new law to sustain him.

I was a brother of Admiral Horatio Nelson's illegitimate son at the Battle of Trafalgar; Josiah Nisbeth was my cabin boy, and he was my confidant when I was able to speak to him once after Horatio Nelson was wounded at Santa Cruz, during a night landing. Josiah saved his life, since he was my friend. I witnessed strenuous efforts to stop his bleeding, which was usually understood to involve manipulating a tourniquet, but the endearing thing is that it was from a palisade that was lost in fiction, being floating timbers from the Trafalgar fleets that had been smashed to pieces. It could have been an act of anonymity, but as it could have been a son lost at sea picked up by Aphrodite giving him tasks to fulfill, being Deimos who intervened in personification of Nelson's terror towards the Franco-Spanish soldiers, not conceived by Josiah Nisbeth in Trafalgar by not participating in the battle, I was a classmate of Admiral Nimitz's son in Midway, Chester Jr Nimitz, of whom I had exclusive attention when he said goodbye to this world with his wife; I Wonthelimar received him in my arms in this way taking him safely to Chauvet, I was seconded by Vlad Tepes who keeps him honored with his episode of a heroic family trunk, just as he saved his son, Îngeraș from his own Wallachian vampire subjects, protecting him from the thirst of bloodthirsty that had been unleashed among them. I stood on the deck of Vlad Tepes's ship, able to see the oozing of a dissolute world oozing from its bilges; I was an animal in Tel Gomel that on its side behaved after morbid barks to the divergent screams of slaves on the Clippers through torn seas, denoting that the ocean lives in its frustrated springs with such morbid obsession... alluded to the shepherd Jethro in Madian; with such bravado of raising licentious shells for the nations that lived execrated and the expectations of the forearm of the libertarian Executioner. This is how rivalry arises in the Hundred Years' War, being able to resist stinging fearful wounds in my cervical-dorsal, clinging to another equal who was pierced by a ****** dagger through his ******-ventral canal in Poitier and Agincourt. Here is my dexterous pen or quill, writing with the meager light of my lapsed candle, unbridled by what it will see in the Grisels; perhaps in the Griselles of Orleans or from where I was able to shield myself from the struggles of Frederick I Barbarossa, appealing to a mechanism of the forearm that decides whether to dare to live or ****, residing in the aforementioned moral paradox, which does not pivot by destroying, but rather fluctuates in its counter order like the thousands who were massacred in the Crusades in the buttresses very close to Moriah.

I have lived desolate for millions of years in total darkness, or rather in the depths of the Cave of darkness where the lost glory of Salvation resides. I have millions of Bat Colonies that depend on me, all covered like species of Madian to cure them of their glaucoma, of buried Saracen mothers with their open wombs wanting to resonate in the salvific lights shrouds of their fallen sons in the Crusades between West and East for the three years from 1093 to 1096, or the Third Crusade three times being of Frederick Barbarossa. Perhaps they are electrographic war neurosciences that experiment from the brief field of the visual range of every Crusader soul that tries and tries again in the visual fields that have been eaten away by the Evil Hemispheres of the Seventh Station of Sorrows; jagged by their fragility at the Seventh Station of the octagonal Way of the Cross, where seated on the Throne, everything is finished in the Second Crusade, just as Jesus falls for the second time, showing his extreme weakness and the weight of the suffering he carries upon himself. At this station, we reflect on perseverance and God's help in rising from falls, both physical and spiritual, perhaps distant from the Menorah or Teshuvah, mostly rusted by Louis IX of France; at the Eighth Station of the Way of the Cross, Jesus comforts the women of Jerusalem. At this moment, while Jesus carries the cross, some women are weeping for him. Jesus tells them not to weep for him, but for themselves and their children, because if they treat the "green tree" (Jesus) like this, what will happen to the "dry tree"? Perhaps this eloquence speaks of the matriarchs, abandoned and resigned in their homes awaiting their beloved Templers, who ended up signing the Treaty of Tunis, granting trade rights to non-rebellious Christians. With such pretension, having revealing territorial permutations, the Crusaders returned to Europe after the arrogant death of Louis IX, presuming to place snowy ribbons on the heads of their condemned.

The hypotheses will be political, foretold of a cerebral, non-political act, rather a feudal believer-skeptic. Wonthelimar has been a witness to this, which later leads him backside, escaping from the Quentinnais family mausoleum, taking him missing from his beloved Marielle. A scientific expedition managed to declare that MRI scans have proven that the act signed by the Papacy before starting the Crusades, already displayed heavenly icons of the Green and Dry Tree, growing from the dry autumn tree that Pope Urban II instigated with the Crusades in 1095, during the Council of Clermont, called on the Christians of Europe to recover the Holy Land from Muslim hands, marking the beginning of the First Crusade with the phrase "Deus vult!" God wants it, but not from a dry tree or Vel Arbor Arida!

I have been captive to heartbreaking voices with enriched ****** fields, while I saw the great armies fleeing with weak aesthetics of a perception, whose plasticity was accentuated with the identification of wounded souls that came for its asylum, here in Chauvet where all its magnetism attracts us from the common brawl, carrying the material on their backs like Atlas, the titan whom Zeus, the supreme god of Olympus punished in a terrible way for rebelling against the gods and against the established order: condemned to hold the weight of the world for all eternity on his shoulders; Perhaps carrying the imprisoned souls they carry within their inner world, resisting him even with their deep and high-pitched shrieks, piously chirping at them and letting them fall upon Hydor and not the fiery roar of Hephaestus, like mournful stars swaying in the house of Fire of his forge, where he worked with metals and created objects for the gods, often located in the volcanic heart of the island of Lemnos.

My Germanic roots make me tremble, abandoned by wicked solitude with few populated doubts, by a heritage where prehistoric fetishes speak with their orientation of images that carry within me, like an Atlas-Ibex confined in exile, yearning to live millions with its archetypal falls, and ambitions like trivial years of lateral syntax of Casus Infernalis that bustle more than a trunk where the digital index goes to contact the dome of the Sistine Chapel and its apostolate. I feel neither cold nor hunger, but if I beg in predictions to heal the one who supplanted my prophetic nurse Amalthea, to see him face to face like the brilliant Sun of Lemnos, attractive where I could forge myself, as if it were the sagittal cut in the murals of Chauvet and the Sistine Chapel as the Last Judgment as divine intelligence that takes away and then grants with its golden chisel or brush of the Archangel Saint Michael amidst the hives of Cherubs, making a delay in the unrevealed Mysteries of Michelangelo Buonarroti aspiring to be a Seraph.

Horses emerged from their confinement, their crimson-colored adornments clinging to the Corpus, which was described as millions of years old, from the same externalized Corpus, since the noble first piece was fragmented from the flashing Genesis. Distrustful and subtle materialized bodies could be seen emerging from this Grotto, some were mounted on their horses, thirds represented from the total of thousands of animals that could not endure the light of Day, making Night another dimension of day that was not, for night sheltered animals that could not endure night as a frontal vision that made them heirs of the nights without having a single day passed. It was random, with the probability that it owed to fluctuations that could never harmonize night with day, leaving in its only sample empty caverns where those who could not grasp the horn of the primeval Aurochs of an indivisible Torah were distributed, leaving them with the penultimate luminescence that could barely be placed in the surprising mud-covered hooves, perhaps of the nubile rhinoceros that dared to cross the fortified walls of the great fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo, originally called the Mausoleum of Hadrian, a preeminent military stronghold in Rome. Originally built as a mausoleum, it was transformed into a defensive fortification during the middle Ages, playing a crucial role in protecting the city. Its original design, along with defensive modifications, was transformed into formidable structures symbolizing the power and preservation of the papacy. Here is the sign that reveals a careful examination, of this species among species, lifting the veils of a surprising episode.

It would be the sixth day, just as in Genesis full of nascent beings of a living being in a morning that refused to be of the Day, but rather of the evening of black birds that upon raising from the sixth day the image perched on the backs of beasts. Wonthelimar was a witness to the declared tablets of Genesis that one day saw him born, being a fundamental piece of the poured out expression of the Shekinah (or Shejiná, שכינה in Hebrew) refers to the divine presence or the glory of God in Jewish theology. It is associated with the manifestation of God's presence in the world and, often, with his dwelling among people. They were the first rows of biomechanics that were compensated by the Equines that tried to revive them from the Crusades as an exceptional Universal rule. Casus Bellis proclaiming the liberation of Jerusalem, from the barony of Wonthelimar, that this lack of foresight in supplying the Crusaders was causing the arrival of such a large number of crusaders from the west, causing tremendous damage to the food and crops of Constantinople. The Emperor of Byzantium was transferred to the distant Bosphorus Strait, bordering, according to the testimonies of those hosted by Chauvet, located in Asia Minor, and to the field of Kibotos (called Civetot by the crusaders). For their part, the crusaders separated and began to plunder fields, wandering in the territory of the Seljuk Turks, around Nicaea. Wonthelimar greatly estimated how much affront could be estimated by having to argue having to move through so many sewer passages and disturbed geographies as the event of ghostly banners surpassing them in the Battle of Dorylaea, diluting the Turkish borders even before reaching Jerusalem. I was the deponent, here my jinxes commemorated the pacts in Avignon of incorruptible supplies that were generously diverted by Klaus Rittke; formerly patron of the Cathedral of the same place. A large number of civilians have circulated distributing the Bread and Wine of the year of our Lord 1099, God is ours said the Ghost of Adhémar next to me, declaring sacred wines to the deceased with the golden chalice and protective layer of poisonous fires of the pagans, running from the fractal of 1098 with the judicious ghost resorting to lighting the candles of sparks of the reduced pagan hell-lit, and plump emulators paralogizing their severed heads between slices of limp ardors of exsufflation of Raymond of Saint-Gilles who smiled suffocating from the chalice, going by supernatural emanations of the Adhémar confluence with the similar hemp of Raymond Bragasse; Dominican cleric who substantiated the coexistence of the Ibex Wonthelimar Ultramundis, this gifted and visionary Demiurge who emerged from his kneeling knees under the patronage of a vain mortal. Raymond Bragasse, after being expelled by Beelzebub, alluded to saying, believing himself to be Lucifer in the sackcloth of Atlas, ****** with the indecency of a despot, Zeus transformed into his iron plumage, tracing the cremations of those who were his deceased soldiers and honored by the forges of a soldier who emerged from the dissipated dreamscapes or dream worlds of Hephestos.

From the pillar with such a visionary spear…, as a Hellenic who fought at Gaugamela would say, I utter, saying that only from the most harmful and most kindly evil sieges do we become pious, that neither Akkadians nor Phoenicians will go searching the Dorus towards the encounter with the filial trunk of Noah, as a Semitic Akkadian people, at the free will of the nautical Phoenicians speaking with the underlying languages of the Semites also attached, who lavished crowning Canaanite visions currently prescribed to them by Wonthelimar of Bishop Adhemar, judging themselves to be children of all those who fell in Jerusalem.
My Casus Infernalis is the poise of a truly villainous revelry, I only have the droppings of my Chiroptera being supplied by Vlad Strigoi from Transylvania, who with Cave Faith and replenishment had their shelves decreeing Vespasian's survival tactics as emperor, using effects to govern and consolidate his power. Among them, highlighting his skill in his intendance and finances, his ability to end trances and his ability to promote the construction of great government works that colossally benefited Rome perhaps captivated by Apollo, to whom he erected a colossal statue that would later serve as messianic inspiration for his son Titus, destroying such catharsis in the firewalls of Jerusalem arranging tunics with their purple stripes that were invoking the esteemed Zeus, deifying the nine lunar days that would remain to have the visions of my advocated Demiurgy, authorizing the preexistence that was being formed with the channels of living Medieval Europe and Judah with its vibrational entity. Great influence of the Visions of the Bishop of Adhémar suggested walking barefoot around the perimeter of the walled city for three days and three nights, just like the prodigious mitzvah of Joshua in Jericho. Intrinsically, the memories of Greece and its ancient polis were being collected in the Chauvet Cave until July 15, 1099.

Wonthelimar was part of this Crusade under the command of William of Embriaco, a prophecy that Vlad Tepes had announced to him in the cockpit of the Strigoi Frigate, from the moment he set sail with his ship from Hormuz, to later join the Genoese forces, marking the first contingencies with effective seafaring reactions to approach Egypt, Ashkelon, and from there, Judah. Throughout that same afternoon, the night, and the morning of the following day, the crusaders unleashed a terrible massacre of men, women, and children, Muslims, Jews, and even the few Christians from the east who had remained in the city. Two thousand Jews were locked in the main synagogue, which was then set on fire. Vlad Tepes levitated from ships, fighting over sulfur fumaroles, hovering over the palisades that were being dismantled to later build the turrets of the illustrious fortifications of Jerusalem. He did not participate directly in the Crusades, but he saw himself as a crusader in his fight against the Ottoman Empire.

Vlad Strigoi says: I was regent in the Principality of Wallachia, incredibly we boasted with Wonthelimar conversing in extended days of who would finally survive whom or how incorrupt we would be over the millennia. A resplendent Ottoman convert was revived in my chamber, which still remains intact as it was from the monastery of Snagov, where we both also resided in a great monastic millennium that made us confreres, Wonthelimar and I played Karniffel shuffling with the German, French, and Romanian symbols. We also went elbow to elbow around the lame one who escaped from the fox and the goose that wandered, breaking the board when we were cooking, and we emptied the glasses with goat's milk and blood from his internal jugular, covering two inches of his clavicle. The crypt, which was commonly referred to, remains intact until Wonthelimar set out to search for Marielle in Gaul, after escaping the inquisitorial armies of Frederick I Barbarossa. He was able to attest that Marielle's death in the Mausoleum of the Quentinnais would be revived in the blazon hanging from Barbarossa's banner or ancient Vexillum, which struggled to keep her cadaverous body intact, only to understand and observe that it wasn't so much her heart, torn out by Beelzebub, that it shone brightly, more in conformity with a tender heart before an execrable banished soul. I am from Wallachia, and I have little and short-sighted knowledge of the descendants of my 3rd lineage, in this attribution of Count and Prince Vladislaus Szekys. As precocious children, Wonthelimar and I played at being active monarchs, courting the good harvests and inheritances of my predecessors and successors, since they have not enjoyed the privilege of outliving me, but I have outlived those who were and will be. In 1456, I returned to Wallachia after assassinating John Hunyadi, thus beginning my reign, but never ceasing to be a Wallachian Prince. This is where Wonthelimar and I agreed to never separate from each other in the distance, making the decision to visit him every winter when Wallachia, in solidarity, would cooperate by bringing them provisions, and my faithful 23,000 soldiers who would take territory with their colony of Bats, where I would settle permanently after being assassinated by feudatories of the Turks, soon after I was betrayed in such an instant that Wonthelimar could receive me in his arms.

I have been enthroned in Chauvet, I have been a Wallachian in exile, seizing the Principality of those who belong to Chauvet, united to the Casus Infernalis of Wonthelimar; now I am the delirium of the most beautiful, acclaimed, and venerated by the Demiurges of the Etréstles of Kalavrita, of such a magnificent ethopoeia or detailed description of the soldiers, clean-faced, without crests or allegorical protections. Sometimes we sing in unison with the wind Pontias, believing I have returned to the Saxon and Transylvanian regions of my own Dracula; I have attended more than poorly to what should be the overcoming of such holistic deaths, reviving from isolation, from none of which I could soothe my pains. The Pontias of Nyons reminds me of the Austru blowing over the canopies of Orion, on warm summer nights, sponsoring plumes with eight-pointed stars and a ruby in the center, with seven horchata pearls and five crowned, like worthy apexes of defeating a Habsburg.
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PERTINAX Apr 23
The pain sours as the milk spills
Rancid subjugation to the rejection
Of a cause without its mode
What positive devolves into negative
A multiplicity of being that sheds light
When consumed by dark dawn
Where clouds bring rain in a permanence
Detached from loving life in full
As the moon wanes to new
Betraying a sky desperate for a clearing
To wash free the trapped potential
Inherent within striated cumulus
Begging for a release that allows breathing
For an inner compassion held captive
And bright sun dimmed by the regret of day
Sadly passing in multitudes; a rehashing
Beyond that of moving skies crying
Tears of forbearance belonging to trees
Drowned under weeks of relentless monsoon
Desperately gasping for a mindful remedy
An explanation for a cycle that perpetually
Stops giving
•••
I breathe out pain only to receive it again

— The End —