Poetry Sunday: from Las piedras del cielo/ Skystones

Posted by liz on

from Las piedras del cielo/ Skystones

BY PABLO NERUDA

X

I invite you to topaz,
to the yellow
the bees,
and the lump of honey
in the topaz,
to the gold day
and the familial
drone of tranquility:
here is a minimal
church, built in a flower
as the bee builds, as
the planes of the sun or the leaf
in autumn’s yellowest profundity,
a tree, incandescently
rising, beam over beam, a sunburst corolla,
insect and honey and autumn, all
transformed by the salts of the sun:
essence of honey, the tremulous world
and the wheat of the sky
that labored to accomplish
this sun-changed, at rest in the pallor of topaz

Poetry Sunday: from Still Another Day

Posted by liz on

from Still Another Day

BY PABLO NERUDA

The days aren’t discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn’t unweave: there is no net.
They don’t fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn’t divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones.