Emily Abellera

“I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
― Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

“Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs,
you look like a world, lying in surrender.
My rough peasant's body digs in you
and makes the son leap from the depth of the earth.

I was lone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and nigh swamped me with its crushing invasion.
To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling.

But the hour of vengeance falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of eager and firm milk.
Oh the goblets of the breast! Oh the eyes of absence!
Oh the roses of the pubis! Oh your voice, slow and sad!

Body of my woman, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my shifting road!
Dark river-beds where the eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.”
― Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems

“Of everything I have seen,
it's you I want to go on seeing:
of everything I've touched,
it's your flesh I want to go on touching.
I love your orange laughter.
I am moved by the sight of you sleeping.

What am I to do, love, loved one?
I don't know how others love
or how people loved in the past.
I live, watching you, loving you.
Being in love is my nature.”
― Pablo Neruda

“Don't go far off, not even for a day,
because I don't know how to say it - a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in
an empty station when the trains are
parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then
the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve
on the beach, may your eyelids never flutter
into the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me for
a second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll
have gone so far I'll wander mazily
over all the earth, asking, will you
come back? Will you leave me here, dying?”
― Pablo Neruda