Explore "The Blind Statue" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It's been thousands and thousands of years of stone.
I was a stonecutter and this is what I did striking without hands or hammer, piercing without chisel, staring into the sun without eyes, without being, without existence but in the wind, with only a wave for my thought, without tools other than time, the time, the passing time.
I sculptured the statue blind so that she wouldn't see, that there in the desolate sand she would keep her mass like my monument: the blind statue which the first man that departed from stone, the son of power, the first that dug, touched and imposed on its lost creation, searching for fire.
And I was born, naked and blue, a stonecutter, lengthwise from shores in darkness from rivers still unknown, in caves lashed by the tails of somber lizards, and it was hard to encounter myself, to become hands, eyes, fingers, seeking my own blood, and then my joy became a statue: my own form that I had copied striking across the centuries in stone.