Read "Ode to a Village Movie Theater" by Pablo Neruda online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Come, my love, let's go to the movies in the village.
Transparent night turns like a silent mill, grinding out stars.
We enter the tiny theater, you and I, a ferment of children and the strong smell of apples.
Old movies are secondhand dreams.
The screen is the color of stone, or rain.
The beautiful victim of the villain has eyes like pools and a voice like a swan; the fleetest horses in the world careen at breakneck speed.
Cowboys make
Swiss cheese of the dangerous Arizona moon.
Our hearts in our mouths, we thread our way through these cyclones of violence, the death-defying duel of the swordsmen in the tower, unerring as wasps the feathered avalanche of Indians, a spreading fan on the prairie.
Many of the village boys and girls have fallen asleep, tired after a day in the shop, weary of scrubbing kitchens.
Not we, my love, we'll not lose even this one dream; as long as we live we will claim every minute of reality, but claim dreams as well: we will dream all the dreams.