The Night of the Soldier by Pablo Neruda — Read

I play the night of the soldier, the time of the man without melancholy or extermination, of the type cast far by the ocean and a wave, and who does not know that the bitter water has separated him and that he is growing old, gradually and without fear, dedicated to what is normal in life, without cataclysms, without absences, living inside his skin and his suit, sincerely obscure. So, then, I see myself with stupid and gay comrades, who smoke and spit and drink horribly, and who suddenly fall down deathly sick. Because, where are the aunt, the bride, the mother-in-law, the sister-in-law of the soldier? Perhaps they die of ostracism or malaria, they grow cold, yellow, and they emigrate to a star of ice, to a cool planet, to rest, at last, among girls and glacial fruits, and their corpses, their poor fiery corpses, will go guarded by alabaster angels to sleep far from the flame and the ash.

Through each day that falls, with its twilight obligation to succumb, I walk, performing an unnecessary watch, and I pass among Mohammedan merchants, among people who adore the cow and the cobra, I pass, unadorable and common faced. The months are not unalterable, and at times it rains; from the heat of the sky falls an infusion as silent as sweat, and over the great vegetables, over the backs of the fierce beasts, along a certain silence, these moist feathers interweave and lengthen. Waters of the night, tears of the monsoon wind, salt saliva fallen like the horse's spume, and slow to augment, poor in splash, astonished in flight.