Morning with Air by Pablo Neruda

Prisoner of the outdoors, a man rolls by at midmorning like a crystalline globe.

What can he understand or know if he's caught like a fish between space and silence, if innocent bushes hide flies of evil from him?

It is my duty as a priest, as a penitent geographer, as a swindled naturalist, to open the traveler's eyes:

I halt in the middle of the street and stop his bicycle:

Have you forgotten, I ask him, villain, know-nothing full of oxygen, the hovel of misfortune and the humiliated corners?

You ignore that, there with a dagger, here with a club and a thrown stone, farther away with a black revolver and in Chicago with a fork vermin are assassinated, doves are torn apart and watermelons have their throats cut?

Be ashamed of oxygen,

I told the surprised traveler, nobody has the right to surrender his life to one single clarity.

We need to enter the dark house, the alley of death, to touch the blood and the terror, to share the horrific evil.

The wanderer nailed me with his two confused eyes and he moved away in the sunlight without responding or understanding.

And he left me-poor me- talking to myself in the street.