to love what we don’t have

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When accepting the Nobel Prize, Pablo Naruda said that the poet must achieve a balance “between solitude and solidarity, between feeling and action, between intimacy of one’s self, the intimacy of mankind, and the revelation of nature.” You may want to read the following lines more than once, allowing them to pierce your carapace.

 

My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.

I love what I do not have. You are so far.

My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.

But night comes and starts to sing to me.

 

The moon turns its clockwork dream.

The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.

And as I love you, the pines in the wind

want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.

 

From “Here I Love You” by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), Chilean poet, political activist, and Nobel Laureate for Literature (1971). source: Merwin, W.S. (Trans.) (1969) Twenty love poems and a song of desire. Penguin Classics, p.71. image by Pablo Picasso.

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