a bit of my heart

Fully Empowered


I write in the clear sun, in the teeming street,
at full sea tide, in a place where I can sing;
only the wayward night inhibits me,
but, interrupted by it, I recover space,
I gather shadows to last a long time.

The black crop of the night is growing
while my eyes in the meantime measure the plain.
So, from sun to sun, I forge the keys.
In the half light I look for locks
and keep on opening broken doors to the sea
until I fill the cupboards up with foam.

And I never weary of going and returning.
Death in its stone aspect does not stop me.
I am weary neither of being nor of non-being.

Sometime I wonder where—
from father or mother or the mountains—
I inherited all my mineral obligations,

the threads spreading from a sea on fire;
and I know I go on and go on because I go on
and I sing because I sing and because I sing.

There is no way of explaining what happens
when I close my eyes and waver
as between two underwater channels—
one lifts me in its branches toward dying
and the other sings in order that I may sing.

And so I am formed out of non-being,
and as the sea goes battering at a reef
in a wave on wave of salty white-tops
and drags back stones in its ebb,
so what there is of death surrounding me
opens in me a window out to living,
and, in a spasm of being, I am asleep.
In the full light of day, I walk in the shade.


-Pablo Neruda