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Sonata and Destructions
By Pablo Neruda
After a great while, after unknown distances,
through confused states, uncertain territories,
accompanied by barren hopes,
and disloyal companies and unsettling dreams,
I love the tenacity that still survives in my eyes,
my heart beats to a rider's steps,
I grasp my dormant fire and fallen grace,
and at night, surrounded by darkness and inconstant sorrow,
I stand watch at the edge of camps,
an armed traveler of futile resistances,
hindered by growing specters and trembling flanks,
my arm of stone defends me.
In the science of grief there is a confused altar,
and in my sessions of lonely evenings,
in my abandoned rooms where the moon dwells,
with withered property and destructions that are dear to me,
I find comfort in my own lost being, my imperfect substance,
my tarnished silver and my eternal loss.
A burning thirst, and its lifeless water,
still wavers, still remains,
and the sterile inheritance, and the treacherous home.
Who consecrated the ruins?
z
Who loved what was lost, who protected what was left?
A bone from a relic, wood from a lost ship,
one's own end, flight,
one's pitiful strength, a wretched god?
I spy, then, on all the emptiness and pain,
and the strange testimony that I bear,
with cruel efficiency and written in ashes,
is the form of oblivion that I prefer,
the name I call the earth, the value of my dreams,
the endless quantity that I measure,
with my winter eyes, during each day of this world.
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