Explore "Rapa Nui" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Tepito-te-henua, navel of the great sea, workshop of the sea, extinguished diadem.
From your volcanic ash man's brow rose above the Ocean, the cracked stone eyes measured the cyclonic universe, and the hand that erected the pure magnitude of your statues was central.
Your religious rock was cut toward all the Ocean's lines and the faces of man appeared, surging from the island's womb, rising from the empty craters with their feet entwined to silence.
They were the sentinels and they closed the cycle of waters that came from all the wet dominions, and the sea facing the masks arrested its tempestuous blue trees.
No one but the faces inhabited the kingdom's circle. The thread which enveloped the island's mouth was silent as the entry of a planet.
And so, in the light of the marine apsis the stone fable decorates the immensity with its dead medals, and the little kings who raise this entire solitary monarchy for the eternity of the foam, return to sea in the invisible night, return to their sarcophagi of salt.
Only the moonfish that perished in the sand.
Only time that erodes the carved heads.
Only eternity in the sands know the words: the sealed light, the dead labyrinth, the keys of the submerged cup.