[Poem - Full text.]
Pablo Neruda ( de los Versos del Capitán)
LOVE
What do you have, what do we have,
what's happening to us?
Oh our love is a hard rope
that ties us hurting us
and if we want
come out of our wound,
separate us,
It makes us a new knot and condemns us
to bleed us and burn us together.
What do you have? I watch you
and I find nothing in you but two eyes
like all eyes, a mouth
lost among a thousand mouths that I kissed, more beautiful,
a body equal to those that slipped
under my body without leaving a memory.
And how empty for the world were you
like a wheat-colored jar
without air, without sound, without substance!
I searched in vain in you
depth for my arms
that they excavate, without ceasing, under the earth:
under your skin, under your eyes nothing,
under your double raised chest
barely
a stream of crystalline order
He does not know why he runs singing.
Why, why, why, my love, why?
