Explore "Men IX" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
They taught us to respect the church, not to cough, not to spit in the atrium, not to wash our clothes upon the altar, but it's not so: life tears apart religions, and on this island the Wind God inhabits the only church living and true: our lives come and go, dying, making love: here on Easter Island where everything is altar, where everything is a workroom for the unknown, a woman nurses her newborn upon the same steps that her gods tread.
Here, they live! But do we?
We transients, followers of the wrong star, were shipwrecked on this island as in a lagoon, like in a lake in which all distances end, on a motionless journey, so difficult for men.