Why do I want this man to stay beside my pillow?

In one of those funny “Truth or Consequence” games in anniversaries or Christmas parties I became the “It”. Music was played and the players had to move around through a big circle and after several playful mock stops, finally the music was off and every player grabbed a partner. I failed to grab a partner so I was asked to choose between “Truth” or “Consequence”. I chose “Truth” and gave everybody a wink. The emcee asked this question: Who do you want to be beside your pillow at night? Without a thought, I barked: Pablo Neruda! Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto is his real name. He is a Chilean poet! The hall got rowdy and to restore the calm, I said: “Ok, I will tell you why I want this man to be near my pillow at night. Just near my pillow, I winked again. Listen everyone, please:

A Dog has died.............................>

Drum roll….Shouts of more more more…Then I read another poem by Neruda:

At gatherings where there is a possibility for sharing a small time performance, I bring a poem or two of my favorite poets and read poetry like all my life depends on it! Pablo Neruda is among my favorite ones. "Isla Negra", a Neruda collection written in Spanish and English has occupied the space beside my pillow for a long time and when I need the poetic fervor stirred in me, Neruda's poetry does the task. Here's a Neruda poem that makes hurdles on the road easier for me to overcome:

Canto XII from the heights of Macchi Picchu

Arise to birth with me, my brother.

Give me your hand out of the depths

sown by your sorrows.

You will not return from these stone fastnesses.

You will not emerge from subterranean time.

Your rasping voice will not come back,

nor your pierced eyes rise from their sockets.

Look at me from the depths of the earth,

tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd,

groom of totemic guanacos,

mason high on your treacherous scaffolding,

iceman of Andean tears,

jeweler with crushed fingers,

farmer anxious among his seedlings,

potter wasted among his clays--

bring to the cup of this new life

your ancient buried sorrows.

Show me your blood and your furrow;

say to me: here I was scourged

because a gem was dull or because the earth

failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone.

Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled,

the wood they used to crucify your body.

Strike the old flints

to kindle ancient lamps, light up the whips

glued to your wounds throughout the centuries

and light the axes gleaming with your blood.

I come to speak for your dead mouths.

Throughout the earth

let dead lips congregate,

out of the depths spin this long night to me

as if I rode at anchor here with you.

And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,

and link by link, and step by step;

sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,

thrust them into my breast, into my hands,

like a torrent of sunbursts,

an Amazon of buried jaguars,

and leave me cry: hours, days and years,

blind ages, stellar centuries.

And give me silence, give me water, hope.

Give me the struggle, the iron, the volcanoes.

Let bodies cling like magnets to my body.

Come quickly to my veins and to my mouth.

Speak through my speech, and through my blood.

Many activists love Neruda’s poems but as far as I’m concerned it’s not just Neruda’s concern for justice that attracts me. It is his total love for beauty that seizes me by the arms. Listening to his poems of love, longing, loneliness, celebration, anger, trivia and anything about life makes me see myself in a child’s eyes of wonder watching the full moon, the sunset, the wilted grass, the stones on the highway…. anything like I am a child seeing things for the first time. When I first read his “Ode to a Lemon”, I immediately rushed to the kitchen to cut a lemon and enjoy the cathedral-like design of the two halves of the fruit. A simple subject as a lemon tackled by Neruda brings to a reader’s mind a world of beauty and introspection and thanksgiving.

If Gabriela Mistral, the poet who greatly influenced Neruda as a young poet, and Pablo Neruda were alive today and were in a TV talk show, they would certainly be asked the question: “Why are both of you Nobel laureates?”. The TV viewers could be having the poetic moment of their lives. What a treasure these two Chileans are!

Here’s a sample of Gabriela Mistral’s poem:

To See Him Again

Never, never again?

Not on nights filled with quivering stars,

or during dawn's maiden brightness

or afternoons of sacrifice?

Or at the edge of a pale path

that encircles the farmlands,

or upon the rim of a trembling fountain,

whitened by a shimmering moon?

Or beneath the forest's

luxuriant, raveled tresses

where, calling his name,

I was overtaken by the night?

Not in the grotto that returns

the echo of my cry?

Oh no. To see him again --

it would not matter where --

in heaven's deadwater

or inside the boiling vortex,

under serene moons or in bloodless fright!

To be with him...

every springtime and winter,

united in one anguished knot

around his bloody neck!