Explore "The House" by Pablo Neruda on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
My house, the walls whose fresh, recently cut wood still smells: dilapidated homestead that creaked with every step, and whistled with the warrior wind of austral weather, becoming stormy element, strange bird beneath whose frozen feathers my song grew.
I saw shadows, faces that grew around my roots like plants, kin who sang songs in the shade of a tree and shot amid the wet horses, women hidden in the shadow cast by masculine towers, gallops that lashed the light, rarefied nights of wrath, barking dogs.
To what lost archipelagoes did my father slip away, with the land's dark daybreak, in his howling trains?
Later I loved the smell of coal in smoke, oils, axles of frozen precision, and the solemn train crossing winter stretched over the earth, like a proud caterpillar.
Suddenly the doors trembled.
It's my father.
The centurions of the road surround him: railwaymen wrapped in wet ponchos, steam and rain cloaked the house with them, the dining room was filled with hoarse stories, glasses were drained, and from those beings to me, like a separate barrier, inhabited by sorrow, anguish arrived, sullen scars, men without money, the mineral claw of poverty.