Best Neruda Poems

Four legs quiver
like clumsy cabrioles
striking smooth gray rivers
of zig-zag sidewalk barrios
in rhythm with happy shivers
syncopated on a muffled drum
as we talk and stroll

On our way
hand-in-hand
we persuade and pretend
this day away
taunting and cajoling to demand
laughing “hide and seeking”
chasing and skedaddling
poking and peeking
like cuddly pandas
or canoodling otters
splashing...

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Every Day You Play
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

Every day you play with Infinity’s rays.
Exquisite visitor, you arrive with the flowers and the water.
You are vastly more than this immaculate head I clasp tightly
like a cornucopia, every day, between my hands ...



My Dog...

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I love you only because I love you
by Pablo Neruda
loose translation by Michael R. Burch

I love you only because I love you;
I am torn between loving and not loving you,
Between apathy and desire.
My heart vacillates between ice and fire.

I love you only because you’re the...

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In his element,
He pauses for a moment:
And takes it all in....

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A fragrance, the tangy dagger
of plums down a road,
sugary kisses on teeth,
juices of life, seeping through fingers,
in sweet ripening flesh,
of meadows, haystacks, the hungry
hiding places in vast houses,
of long forgotten mattresses, wild green valley
glanced from aloft, through a secret window:
all of adolescence burns and drowns,
like...

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Self made men like you are rare
Such vision and passion you had to share

So sure at such an early age
Of words you placed upon a page

Love flowed through your soul and veins
And spilled upon the pages plain

You pawned everything a man can know
So sure of...

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The Poem Neruda Did Not Write 
(Ode to Pablo Neruda)

Hello, Pablo, nice to see you are here!
Not feeding the Bird? at A Lemon grove
that hums A Song of Despair, which appear

to be From--Twenty Poems of Love  
that were forever Lost in the forest...
of Nothing...

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Oh unruhige Welt,
höre seinen Gesang,
vom rauschenden Ozean 
bis zur weiten Kette der Anden

Erhabenes Macchu Picchu,
hier wandelt sein Geist
zwischen den Nebelbänken 
des Urabamba und den
eisigen Höhen der Berge

Du hattest viele Leben,
den für ein einziges 
war keine Zeit.
Deine Worte klingen in mir
mit der Melancholie
verlöschender Sterne 

Der Pöbel,...

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The saddest lines begin tonight, with a lone soul 
Bare but for the thin veil of a pale white moonlight,
Beside myself, and taxed upon deep reflection,
For the night is starry, and my empty cup has fallen -
Shattered glass refracting even more of the stellar sky,
Mapping...

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The passionate propensity
   of waxing moons' passages,
I crave your poetry
    as the air I breathe,
vital spirit aches within intention
    hungering the darkly blissed 
       taste of essential Neruda -
midst the significance...

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at the first encounter, i thought, that he stole my mother’s tablecloth,
and called it Great while she turned the flour into bread,

after, i thought, what if they were lovers, and shared the same tablecloth
while my father was sweating in his fields, and she was sipping...

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A sensual man,  songs full of his land

Loving love, spoke without censure

His life giving him words...

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Take me. . . Float me. . .
to your Macchu Picchu.
Swirl me with your images surreal.
Show me nights, like those where stars shine blue
and she is not with you. . . 
so I might feel
that beauty born “between the hill and river”
and the loneliness your...

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Captain of the Farthest Islands
living poem between my prose
that each one was exchanged for roses
with moonlight and roving mornings


You loved as few have loved
with the madness of sea and clear lyrics
the greatest poet that will remain in us
like him in the calm portrayed...


The island was...

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Advice to Young Poets
by Nicanor Parra Sandoval
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Youngsters,
write however you will
in your preferred style.
Too much blood flowed under the bridge
for me to believe
there’s just one acceptable path.
In poetry everything’s permitted.

Originally published by Setu



Ivy
by Michael R. Burch

“Van trepando en mi viejo dolor...

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