Read "The First Journey" by Pablo Neruda online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I don't know when we came to Temuco.
It was vague, being born, and a slow business, being truly born, and slowly feeling, knowing, hating, loving.
All that has both flowers and thorns.
From the dusty bosom of my country they took me, still an infant, into the rain of Araucania.
The boards of the house smelled of the woods, of the deep forest.
From that time on, my love had wood in it and everything I touched turned into wood.
They became one in me, lives and leaves, certain women and the hazelnut spring, men and trees.
I love the world of wind and foliage.
I can't tell lips from roots.
From axes and rain, it grew up, that town of wood recently carved, like a new star stained with resin, and the saw and the sierras made love day and night, singing away, working away, and that sharp chirp of the cricket raising its plaint in the unyielding solitude turns into my song, my own song.
My heart goes on cutting wood, singing with the sawmills in the rain, milling together cold, sawdust, wood smell.