Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

by Pablo Neruda

To live on, to survive, I forged you like a weapon, like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling. But now falls the hour of vengeance, and I love you.

Mark my path in your bow of hope and I will loose in delirium my flock of arrows.

And I watch them, distant, my words. More than mine, they are yours. They go climbing on my old pains like ivy.

Now I want them to tell what I want to tell you so that you hear me as I want you to hear me.

You, I remember as you were last autumn. You were the gray beret and the heart in calm. In your eyes clashed the flames of twilight. And the leaves would fall in the water of your soul.

Clinging to my arms like a vine, the leaves gathered your voice slow and calm. Bonfire of stupor in which my thirst blazed. Sweet hyacinth, blue, twisted over my soul.

I am the desperado, the word without echoes, he who lost it all, and he who had it all.

I would remember you with my soul clenched by that sadness which you know in me.

Let me speak to you too with your silence clear as a lamplight, simple as a ring. You are like the night, quiet and starry. Your silence is a star, so distant and primitive.

I can write the saddest verses this night. I craved her, and at times she too craved me.

I can write the saddest verses this night. To think that I don’t hold her. To feel that I have lost her.

What matter, that my love could not guard her. The night is starry and she is not with me.

Already I don’t want her, it is certain—but perhaps I do. It is so short, love, and forgetting is so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms, my soul is not content with having lost her.

Though this be the last pain she causes me, and these the last ve...