Explore "The Oceanics" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
With no gods but rotten seal hides, honor of the sea, Yamanas lashed and the antarctic whip, Alakalufs smeared with oils and detritus: amid the walls of crystal and abyss the little canoe, in the bristling enmity of icebergs and rain, carried the sea lions' roving love and the fire's coals borne above the endmost mortal waters.
Man, if extermination did not descend from the rivers of snow or from the moon hardened above the glacial vapor of the glaciers, but from man who, even in the substance of lost snow and the Ocean's uttermost waters, speculated with exiled bones until he drove you beyond everything, and today, beyond everything and the snow and the unleashed tempest of ice your dugout plies the wild salt and furious solitude seeking the haunts of bread, you're Ocean, a droplet from the sea and its furious blue, and your frazzled heart calls me like an incredible fire that refuses to die.
I love the icy plant assailed by the howling foamy wind, and at the base of the gorges, diminutive lucernarian hosts burn above crustacean lamps of water stirred by the cold, and the antarctic dawn in its castle of pale imaginary splendor.
I love even the turbulent roots of plants burned by the dawn of transparent hands, but this wave born in ruptures, driven like love wounded beneath the wind, rolls to you, seashade, child of the glacial plumes, tattered oceanic.