Pablo Neruda / The poet

The poet recompensed, 1956
Rene Magritte

The poet

by Pablo Neruda
BIOGRAPHY

Translated by Ben Belitt

That time when I moved among happenings
in the midst of my mournful devotions; that time
when I cherished a leaflet of quartz,
and stared at a lifetime's vocation.

I ranged in the markets of avarice
where goodness is bought for a price, breathed
the insensate miasmas of envy, the inhuman
contention of masks and existences.

I endured in the bog-dweller's element; the lily
that breaks on the water in a sudden
disturbance of bubbles and blossoms, devoured me.
Whatever the foot sought, the spirit deflected,
or sheered toward the fang of the pit.

So my poems took beina, in travail
retrieved from the thorn, like a penance,
wrenched by a seizure of hands, out of solitude;
or they parted for burial
their secretest flower in immodesty's garden.

Estranged to myself, like shadow on water
that moves through a corridor's fathoms,
I sped through the exile of each man's existence,
this way and that, and so, to habitual loathing;
for I saw that their being was this: to stifle
one half of existence's fullness like fish
in an alien limit of ocean. And there,
in immensity's mire, I encountered their death;

Death grazing the barriers,
Death opening roadways and doorways.