Ode to Bicycles by Pablo Neruda

I was walking down a sizzling road: the sun popped like a field of blazing maize, the earth was hot, an infinite circle with an empty blue sky overhead.

A few bicycles passed me by, the only insects in that dry moment of summer, silent, swift, translucent; they barely stirred the air.

Workers and girls were riding to their factories, giving their eyes to summer, their heads to the sky, sitting on the hard beetle backs of the whirling bicycles that whirred as they rode by bridges, rosebushes, brambles and midday.

I thought about evening when the boys wash up, sing, eat, raise a cup of wine in honor of love and life, and waiting at the door, the bicycle, stilled, because only moving does it have a soul, and fallen there it isn't a translucent insect humming through summer but a cold skeleton that will return to life only when it's needed, when it's light, that is, with the resurrection of each day.