Sonnet 69, a poem by Pablo Neruda.

Post 549 - Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. His original name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, but he used the pen name Pablo Neruda for over 20 years before adopting it legally in 1946 in honor of the famous Czech poet, Jan Neruda. He remains the most widely read of the Spanish American poets. From the 1940s on, his works reflected the political struggle of the left and other socialist developments in South America. He also wrote beautiful love poems - his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924) has sold over a million copies since it first appeared.

Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was the color of "esperanza" (hope) He once said, “The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”


Sonnet 69 by Pablo Neruda.

Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence,
without you moving, slicing the noon
like a blue flower, without you walking
later through the fog and the cobbles,

without the light you carry in your hand,
golden, which maybe others will not see,
which maybe no one knew was growing
like the red beginnings of a rose.

In short, without your presence: without your coming
suddenly, incitingly, to know my life,
gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind:

since then I am because you are,
since then you are, I am, we are,
and through love I will be, you will be, we'll be.