The Sea and the Bells Quotes

“The whole human earth was bleeding.
Time, buildings, routes, rain,
erase the constellation of the crime,
the fact is, this small planet
has been covered a thousand times by blood,
war or vengeance, ambush or battle,
people fell, they were devoured,
and later oblivion wiped clean
each square meter: sometimes
a vague, dishonest monument,
other times a clause in bronze,
and still later, conversations, births,
townships, and then oblivion.
What arts we have for extermination
and what science to obliterate memory!
What was bloody is covered with flowers.
Once more, young men, ready yourselves
for another chance to kill, to die again,
and to scatter flowers over the blood.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Sea and the Bells

“Forgive me if my eyes see
no more clearly than sea foam,
please forgive that my form
grows outward without license
and never stops:
monotonous is my song,
my word is a shadow bird,
fauna of stone and sea, the grief
of a winter planet, Incorruptible.
Forgive me this sequence of water,
of rock, of foam, of the tide’s
delirium: this is my loneliness:
salt in sudden leaps against the walls
of my secret being, in such a way
that I am a part
of winter,
of the same flat expanse that repeats
from bell to bell, in wave after wave,
and from a silence like a woman’s hair,
a silence of seaweed, a sunken song.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Sea and the Bells