Not Only the Albatross by Pablo Neruda — Read

You're not expected, not by springtime, not in the corolla's thirst, not in the purple honey woven fiber by fiber in vine stocks and clusters, but in the tempest, in the tattered torrential cupola of the reef, in the crevice drilled by dawn, and even more, on the green spears of defiance, in the crumbling solitude of marine wastelands.

Brides of salt, procellarian pigeons, you lent your back wet by the sea to every impure aroma of the earth, and into the wild purity you plunged the celestial geometry of flight.

You're sacred, not only the one that rode the gale of the bough like a cyclonic droplet: not only the one that nests on the slopes of fury, but the gull rounded off with snow, the form of the cormorant upon the foam, the silver-plated bundle of platinum.

When the pelican fell like a clenched fist, plunging its volume, when prophecy soared on the vast wings of the albatross, and when the petrel's wind flew over eternity in motion, beyond the old cormorants, my heart took refuge in its cup and extended the mouth of its song to the seas and feathers.

Grant me the icy tin that you bear in your breast to the tempestuous stones, grant me the condition that collects in the talons of the osprey, or the motionless stature that resists all growth and ruptures, the abandoned orange-blossom wind and the taste of the boundless homeland.