Poem: Oh Earth, Wait for Me
Poet: Pablo Neruda
Date of Birth and Death: 12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973
Nationality: Chilean
Brief Biography: A diplomat for most of his life Pablo Neruda was a Nobel Prize–winning Chilean poet who was once called "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language’.
Return me, oh sun,
to my wild destiny,
rain of the ancient wood,
bring me back the aroma and the swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp at the river-margins,
the smell of the larch-tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded restlessness
of towering araucaria.
Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots,
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.
Pablo Neruda
Tr: Alaistair Reid
Pablo is one of my personal favourite poets and this piece sings to me as more and more I find myself drawn to living at peace with the natural world and also in peace with my own being as is right for me and not what others think it should be.
