The Poet by Pablo Neruda — Read

I used to wander through life amid an ill-starred love: I used to keep a little page of quartz to rivet my eyes to life.

I bought kindness, I was in the market of greed, I inhaled envy's most sordid waters, the inhuman hostility of masks and beings,

I lived a sea-swamp world in which the flower, the lily, suddenly consumed me in their foamy tremor, and wherever I stepped my soul slid toward the teeth of the abyss.

That's how my poetry was born, barely freed from the nettles, clutched above solitude like a punishment, or its most secret flower sequestered in the garden of immodesty until it was buried.

And so isolated like the dark water that inhabits its deep corridors,

I fled from hand to hand, to each being's alienation, to daily hatred.

I knew that was how they lived, hiding half of their beings, like fish from the strangest sea, and in the murky immensities I encountered death.

Death opening doors and roads.

Death gliding along the walls.