7/21/2004: Neruda apples

[lumberjim]

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Pablo Neruda
<center>Tonight I Write (the saddest lines)
I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.</center> <center>Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."</center> <center>The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.</center> <center>I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.</center> <center>On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.</center> <center>She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?</center> <center>I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.</center> <center>To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.</center> <center>What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.</center> <center>That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.</center> <center>As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.</center> <center>The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.</center> <center>I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.</center> <center>Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.</center> <center>I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.</center> <center>Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.</center> Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.