Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

by Pablo Neruda

I feel your eyes wander and it is distant, the autumn: gray beret, voice of bird and heart of home to where my profound longings migrated and my happy kisses fell like embers.

The nocturnal birds peck at the first stars that flicker like my soul when I love you.

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

In my deserted, desert land you are the last rose.

Familiar like an old path. They people you—echoes and voices nostalgic. I awoke and at times they migrated and they flew, birds that had slept in your soul.

I will bring you from the mountains happy flowers, bellflowers, dark hazels, and wild baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees.

To hear the night, immense—more immense without her. And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

It is so short, love, and forgetting is so long.