Tonight I can write

There are things you owe yourself and there are things you owe others. I have no idea where this appreciation I have for Pablo Neruda's poems fits in. Appreciation is a weak word, make that respect or better still make that awe.Poetry has to touch me, touch me enough to make me smile, make me cry or perhaps touch me enough so that I lose all sense. Show me a verse that does any of the above and I can assure you those words will find a way into my memory, they will be etched forever as alive metaphors. Anything less, does not qualify.



So on a summer day about a decade ago or more, a tiny article in Deccan Herald caught my attention. It was a tribute to Pablo Neruda and his poetry and as I skimmed through the lines, a couple of verses blew me away. Years later, I have still have the now yellowed parchment,opened and re-opened, folded and refolded a hundred times since, waiting to be claimed or waiting to claim me. Over the years I have read and re-read them and the revelation that someone's love or someone's pain (and quite often they can be the same really) can be so gracefully and truthfully accepted still numbs me as it did ages ago.


Take this one of Neruda's poems for instance , the poem was called "Tonight I can write and these words

"Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her."...spring out at you.

All I know is that he was a Chilean poet, a lot of his work has been transalated into English and he has a permanent place in many dusty well thumbed anthologies and the hearts of hundreds of poetry lovers alike. What did he write about?He wrote about love, about longing, about the Spanish civil war and about his political and often fiery views.

But then this is not about the poet at all, for I believe that with every great poet, his words leave him far behind and take off on a journey of their own into the ideas and beliefs of their readers. Long after the poet has been forgotten, the words live as a burning memory to a wordsmith now discarded. The poet conjures an image, the image begins it own life and then gradually comes into its own when it begins to exist without the tag of the creator. I dont need to know his biography at all, his words have introduced me to him.

I will let his words do the talking. Some of his classics can be found here, more are found elsewhere on the net.
The Poems of Pablo Neruda


What about the verses you ask, the ones that have continued to haunt me for some time now? The poems was called "If you forget" and the lines were

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.


Scarlett