Explore "The Unhappy One" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I left her in the doorway waiting and I went away, away.
She didn't know I would not come back.
A dog passed, a nun passed, a week and a year passed.
The rains washed out my footprints and the grass grew in the street, and one after another, like stones, like gradual stones, the years came down on her head.
Then the war came like a volcano of blood.
Children and houses died.
And that woman didn't die.
The whole plain caught fire.
The gentle yellow gods who for a thousand years had gone on meditating were cast from the temple in pieces.
They could not go on dreaming.
The sweet houses, the veranda where I slept in a hammock, the rosy plants, the leaves in the shape of huge hands, the chimneys, the marimbas, all were crushed and burned.
And where the city had been only cinders were left, twisted iron, grotesque heads of dead statues and a black stain of blood.
And that woman waiting.