Explore "Now We Are Leaving Paita" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Paita, over the coast, rotten wharves, shattered staircases, the gloomy pelicans, exhausted, sitting on dead wood, the cotton bales, the vendors' booths at Piura.
Full of dreams and empty,
Paita moves to the rhythm of the small waves of the ocean's road, against the calcified wall.
It seems that here some huge absence shook and demolished the rooftops and the streets.
Empty houses, dense broken walls, a bougainvillea shoots up into the light: a jet of purple blood, the desert's dry abandon.
The ship has long cut its path into the distance.
Paita remained asleep in the sand.
Unburied Manuela, shattered, in the atrocities, harsh loneliness.
The ships returned. In full sunlight, they unloaded black merchandise.
Great bald birds remain still over burning stones.
The ship leaves.
The Earth no longer has a name.
Between the twin blueness of the sky and the ocean, there exists a sandy line.
It is dry, lonely, the product of shadows.
Then night caves in.
And the ship and coast and sea and land and song set a course for oblivion.