Integration by Pablo Neruda

I did not write this poem, but had to share the beautiful words by Chilean poet P. Neruda.

Intregrations

After everything, I will love you as if it were always before, as if after so much waiting, not seeing you and you not coming, you were breathing close to me forever.


Close to me with your habits with your color and your guitar just as countries unite in schoolroom lectures and two regions become blurred and there is a river near a river and two volcanoes grow together.

Close to you is close to me and your absence is far from everything and the moon is the color of clay in the night of quaking earth when, in terror of the earth, all the roots join together and silence is heard ringing with the music of fright. Fear is also a street. And among its terrifying stones tenderness somehow is able to march with four feet and four lips.

Since, without leaving the present that is a fragile ring, we touch the sand of yesterday and on the sea, love reveals a repeated fury.

---------- Whoever loved as we did? Let us hunt for the ancient cinders of a heart that burned and make our kisses fall one by one, till that empty flower rises again. Let us love the love that consumed its fruit and went down, its image and its power, into the earth: you and I are the light that endures, its irrevocable delicate thorn. Bring to that love, entombed by so much cold time, by snow and spring, by oblivion and autumn, the light of a new apple, light of a freshness opened by a new wound, like that ancient love that passes in silence through an eternity of buried mouths.

---------- Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence, without your moving, lulcing the moon like a blue flower, without you walking later through the fog and the cobbles, without the light you carry in your hand, golden, which maybe others will not see, which maybe no one knew was growing like the red beginnings of a rose. In short, without your presence: without your coming suddenly, incitingly, to know my life, gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind: since then I am because you are, since then you are, I am, we are, and through love I will be, you will be, we'll be.

by Pablo Neruda