I read Pablo Neruda's Isla Negra for the first time as a teen. Each poem was like one in a series of doors that led to an enchanted garden. I wasn't sure what I expected when I had finished the book but still remember soaking in afterglow of his words. I was too young then to know the pain of love lost or know how quickly the tide can turn, the foreboding along the way ignored to one's own peril.
Coming to the other side is on be on dry earth with no sign of cloud or rain. All that you held true or knew of the shared past, the brightest of memories all rendered ashen at once. There are some lines that are like refrain bear meaning all through life and a few that shine bright once and then fade out. If there was love once that is now lost, no words more powerful than these to remember who and what had been
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
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