Poetry can be surreal or simple and everything in between. Styles can coexist, like the contradictions in our own thinking, a knife for killing, a knife to slice bread.
Pablo Neruda had a distinctive poetic style characterized by vivid imagery, passionate emotions, and a profound connection to nature and everyday life.
Poetry happens when you can be honest with yourself. I trust a poem over a political manifesto any day. So, when does one become a poet? What does Neruda have to say?
Poetry by Pablo Neruda
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
Anyone who has written poetry know that the poems just arrive, often without having to conjure them. They demand attention, often coming while you are trying to sleep or driving down the freeway. You must wake up, you must pull over.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
Deep, eloquent, but easily read and similar to the epiphany that astronaut John Mitchel had when he was returning from the moon and saw the earth as a single organism. Neruda is sharing his epiphany with us, perhaps similar to the epiphany that many of us had, and making it accessible to those with a minimal education.
I found he has a lot in common with my spiritual guide, Lao Tzu, who lived over 500 hundred years before Christ. The cornerstone of his writing is the mystery of existence. The mystery is that fire that Neruda was trying to decipher.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
