A Teaspoonful from Neruda

THERE is something preposterous about picking individual poems or even collections out of this boundlessness," the Swedish Academy's secretary said last week of Pablo Neruda's work. It is "like bailing a 50,000-tonner with a teaspoon." Herewith a teaspoonful:

. . . look at me from the depths of the earth, tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd . . . jeweler with crushed fingers . . . 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. . .

--From The Heights of Macchu Picchu, XII

The Turtle

. . . Patriarch, long hardening into his time, he grew weary of waves and stiffened himself like a flatiron. Having dared so much ocean and sky, time and terrain, he let his eyes droop and then slept, a boulder among other boulders.

To The Foot From Its Child

The child's foot is not yet aware it's a foot, and wants to be a butterfly or an apple. But later, stones and glass shards, streets, ladders, and the paths in the rough earth go on teaching the foot it cannot fly. cannot be a fruit swollen on the branch. Then, the child's foot was defeated, fell in the battle, was a prisoner condemned to live in a shoe . . .

--From A New Decade (Poems: 1958-1967)

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