Explore "What happened to me in Colombia" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
What happened to me in Colombia, a country well known for its exquisite emeralds, is hard to say.
It came about that there they looked for one for me, they found and cut it and the fingers of all the poets lifted it up to offer me, and at the very height of the hands of all the gathered poets, my heavenly stone, my emerald ascended, slipping up into the air during a storm that shook us with fear.
Now in that country the butterflies, especially the ones from the province of Muzo, shine with indescribable brilliance, and on this occasion, after the emerald's ascension and the end of the storm, the space filled with shimmering blue butterflies, eclipsing the sun and wrapping it in huge branches of leaves, as though suddenly in the midst of us, the astonished poets, there had sprouted an enormous blue tree.
This event took place in Colombia, in the province of Charaquira, in October of 194-
I never recovered the emerald.