What Is Born with Me by Pablo Neruda — Read

I sing to the grass that is born with me in this free moment, to the fermentations of cheese, of vinegar, to the secret spurt of the first semen, I sing to the song of milk which now comes in rising whiteness to the nipples,

I sing to the fertility of the stable, to the fresh dung of great cows from whose aroma fly multitudes of blue wings, I speak without any shift of what is happening now to the bumblebee with its honey, to the lichen in its soundless germination.

Like an everlasting drum sounds the flow of succession, the course from being to being, and I'm born, I'm born, I'm born with all that is being born, I'm one with growing, with the spread silence of everything that surrounds me, teeming, propagating itself in the dense damp, in threads, in tigers, in jelly.

I belong to fruitfulness and I'll grow while lives grow.

I'm young with the youthfulness of water,

I'm slow with the slowness of time,

I'm pure with the purity of air, dark with the wine of night, and I'll only be still when I've become so mineral that I neither see nor hear, nor take part in what is born and grows.

When I picked out the jungle to learn how to be, leaf by leaf,

I went on with my lessons and learned to be root, deep clay, voiceless earth, transparent night, and beyond that, bit by bit, the whole jungle.