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knife - grizzly bear
July 12 : )
It's the birthday of Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda, born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, in Parral, Chile (1904). He's the author of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), Residence on Earth (1933), and The Captain's Verses (1952). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He began to write poetry at age 10, but his father, who was a railway worker, discouraged him. When he published his poetry in his teens, Neruda chose a new name to hide his work from his father. He liked "Pablo," and saw the name of Jan Neruda, a nineteenth century Czech writer, while glancing through a literary journal. In 1949 he fled Chile. He was a senator, but he had published a letter critical of the president and he was wanted by the government. He rode on horseback over the Andes Mountains to Argentina, on a trail covered with rock slides and grave sites. He carried with him in his saddlebag the manuscript of one of his greatest works, an epic poem about Latin America, Canto General (1950).
If You Forget Me
Pablo Neruda
I want you to know
one thing. You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land. But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
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