Tonight I Can Write

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance'.

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her.  To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all.  In the distance someone is singing.  In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's.  She will be another's.  As she was before my kisses. 

Her voice, her bright body.  Her finite eyes.

I no longer lover her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

translated by Marisa Fortuno

Pablo Neruda

I crave you mouth, your voice, your hair

Don't go far off, not even for a day

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because,

because, I don't know how to say it: a day is long

and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station

when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because

then the little drops of anguish will all run together, 

the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift

into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;

may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.

Will you come back?  Will you leave me here, dying?

Pablo Neruda

Voltaire on God

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Voltaire on Death

Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.

Love...

Since meeting you, I know that love is the most important thing one can have.

I used to think that love was only real in movies

and that I enjoyed being alone

I used to think

that I was too independent

that I didn't need anyone

but after meeting you

I realize that my attitude

towards love

was just a cover-up of my disappointment with relationships

I put on a strong, apathetic front

so no one would know how I really felt

but after meeting you

I can no longer pretend

my feelings became transparent

and now I want to tell the whole world

something I always knew but was afraid to admit

that love is the most important thing one can have

and I want to thank you, for making me to be honest with myself and others

Intellect

We should take care not to make the intellect our god, it has, of course powerful muscles, but no personality.

Albert Einstein

Love...

Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.  How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?  Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour.  Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute.  Thats relativity.

Albert Einstein