Explore "The Ship" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We walked and climbed: the world was a parched noon, the air didn't tremble, the leaves didn't exist, the water was far away.
The boat or prow then rose from the deserts and sailed towards the sky: a point of stone guided towards the unbearable infinity, a closed palace for the lost gods.
And there was the prow, the arrow, the ship or dreadful tower, and for the toiling, the thirsty, the dusty, the sweating race of man that climbed the difficult hills, neither water nor bread nor pasture, only a large rock that rose, only a stubborn boat of stone and music.
For how long? I cried out, we shouted.
Finally mother earth killed us with its harsh cactus, with its ironous maternity, with all this desert, sweat, wind, and sand, and when we finally arrived to rest, wrapped in void, a boat of stone still wanted to ship us toward where, without wings, we couldn't fly without dying.
This we endured when we were tired and the mountain range was hard, heavy as a chain.
Only then, my journey ended, here: beyond, where death began.