So today is one of those days in my life when all I really want from life is the liberty to excuse myself from it as I know it and head north into the cosseted, reassuring refuge of the hills.
It is uncanny when you open your eyes to days which remind you that you have forgotten most things that make you and you end up feeling like a shell that stands at the shore, waiting to be swept off but you find that you adorn a hushed window pane and that is where perhaps you will remain till the time the perception of space and eternity dissolves itself for you.
Which brings me to the excerpt from a poem written by Pablo Neruda called ‘Pido Silencio’ translated by Alastair Reid, which reads something like this:
“ Now leave me alone.
Now learn to do without me.
I’m going to close my eyes.
And I want five things only,
Five favorite roots.
One is endless love.
The second is to see autumn.
I cannot be if the leaves
Don’t fly and fall to earth.
The third is the solemn winter,
The rain I loved, the caress
Of fire in the rough cold.
My fourth is the summer,
Plump as a watermelon.
And fifthly, your eyes.
Matilde, my dear love,
I will not sleep without your eyes,
I will not exist but in your gaze.
I adjust the spring
For you to follow me with your eyes.
That, friends, is all I want.
Next to nothng, close to everything.
Now they can go if they wish.
I have lived so much that someday
They will have to forget me forcibly,
Rubbing me off the blackboard.
My heart was inexhaustible.
But because I ask for silence,
Don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
It happens I’m going to live.
To be, and go on being.
I will not be, however, if, inside me
The crop does not keep sprouting,
The shoots first, breaking through the earth
To reach the light;
But the mothering earth is dark,
And, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
The night leaves stars behind
And goes on alone across fields.
It’s a question of having lived so much
That I want to live that much more.
I never felt my voice so clear,
Never have been so rich in kisses.
Now, as always, it is early.
The light is a swarm of bees.
Let me alone with the day.
I ask leave to be born.”
It is uncanny when you open your eyes to days which remind you that you have forgotten most things that make you and you end up feeling like a shell that stands at the shore, waiting to be swept off but you find that you adorn a hushed window pane and that is where perhaps you will remain till the time the perception of space and eternity dissolves itself for you.
Which brings me to the excerpt from a poem written by Pablo Neruda called ‘Pido Silencio’ translated by Alastair Reid, which reads something like this:
“ Now leave me alone.
Now learn to do without me.
I’m going to close my eyes.
And I want five things only,
Five favorite roots.
One is endless love.
The second is to see autumn.
I cannot be if the leaves
Don’t fly and fall to earth.
The third is the solemn winter,
The rain I loved, the caress
Of fire in the rough cold.
My fourth is the summer,
Plump as a watermelon.
And fifthly, your eyes.
Matilde, my dear love,
I will not sleep without your eyes,
I will not exist but in your gaze.
I adjust the spring
For you to follow me with your eyes.
That, friends, is all I want.
Next to nothng, close to everything.
Now they can go if they wish.
I have lived so much that someday
They will have to forget me forcibly,
Rubbing me off the blackboard.
My heart was inexhaustible.
But because I ask for silence,
Don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
It happens I’m going to live.
To be, and go on being.
I will not be, however, if, inside me
The crop does not keep sprouting,
The shoots first, breaking through the earth
To reach the light;
But the mothering earth is dark,
And, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
The night leaves stars behind
And goes on alone across fields.
It’s a question of having lived so much
That I want to live that much more.
I never felt my voice so clear,
Never have been so rich in kisses.
Now, as always, it is early.
The light is a swarm of bees.
Let me alone with the day.
I ask leave to be born.”
