Explore "I suffer for that friend who died" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I suffer for that friend who died and who like me was a good carpenter.
Together we worked our way through tables and streets, through wars, through sorrows, through stones.
How his awareness grew along with mine!
He was dazzling, that bony one, and his smile was bread to me.
We stopped meeting and V. went on burying himself till he was forced into the ground.
From then on, the same people who cornered him while he lived dress him up, shake him, bemedal him, refuse him his death, and they arm the poor sleeping one with their own sharp thorns and aim them at me, to kill me, to see who measures more: my poor dead one, or I, his living brother.
And I look now for someone to tell this to and there is no one to understand these miseries, this consuming bitterness.
It would take someone generous and that one no longer smiles.
He's dead, and I find no one to whom I can say that they cannot and will not accomplish anything- he, in the country of his death, with his work fulfilled and I with my labors.
We are only two poor carpenters who deserve respect among ourselves, with a right to death and a right to life.