Poetry

Yes, as my dear friend at Cheek reminded us all with a blunt instrument to the side of the head, it’s National Poetry Month. Despite what he thinks, or maybe this just means I’m not a “real” writer, I have never been a great lover of poetry. I have tried to love it. I have read it, and written it, but find reading it can be a chore and my attention span seems to last the length of a remote control-controlling 12-year old with Attention Deficit Disorder. I have tried to read old epics, a la Homer or those of Iceland, but again, find my mind drifting. A book of Yeats poems lingered by my bedside for a year and was dutifully taken up from time to time, hoping to find those lines that would stick. During a Scandinavian Tale & Ballad class I did find myself attracted to these valkyrie-like women in the poems who were kicking ass, usually by seeking some sort of revenge for wrongdoing done upon their honor.

Admittedly, I’ve always been slightly in awe of people who suddenly recite a couple lines of poetry during a poignant moment of love, danger, reflection. Okay, you usually see this happening only in literature or in the movies, or by someone who’s English, but it still impresses me.

I have been able to get into Pablo Neruda poems though. I like to read them in Spanish and try to be all sensual and pretend I really do understand what I’m reading. I read them slowly in English trying to mock the speed and flow of Andy Garcia, who recited my very favorite Neruda poem, “Tonight I can write the saddest lines,” on the Il Postino soundtrack. And a few times in the past, during overwhelming romantic moments when I had someone to recite to, I would call up and read a stanza onto his voicemail hoping he’d find it a nice change to the usual messages one has to retrieve. I think it was probably a better idea to me than to him.

Anyway, although I might have done it before, I am now going to write out my aforementioned favorite Neruda poem, Tonight I can write the saddest lines. Now, I’m writing this is English, which is a translation of the original Spanish, so you may find slightly varying versions of this in other places. Kudos to fellow blogger, papersnow for having the version I was looking for. Enjoy.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines
Write for example, ‘The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings’

Tonight I can write the saddest lines
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky

She loved me and sometimes I loved her too
How could one not have loved her great, still eyes?

Tonight I can write the saddest lines
To think that I do not have her, to feel that I have lost her
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her
And the verse falls to the snow like dew to the pasture

What does it matter that my love could not keep her?
The night is shattered and she is not with me
This is all

In the distance someone is singing
In the distance, my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her

My sight searches for her as if to go to her
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night, whitening the same trees
We, of that time, are no longer the same

I no longer love her, that’s certain,
But how I loved her
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing

Another’s. She will be another’s.
Like my kisses before
Her bright body, her infinite eyes

I no longer love her, that’s certain
But maybe I love her
Love is so short, forgetting is so long

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
And these the last verses that I write for her.



*sniff*