It is often just as intriguing to find poems that I don't love--trying to imagine or decipher just what the author was thinking when they penned/typed the words.
Interesting how sometimes we give more credence to dead people than living people. (Truth in The Band Perry's song: "Funny when you're dead how people start listening.")
Really though..when there is a particularly hidden metaphor or confusing wording, if the person is a classic poet, or old, I tend to think it is me who has just not quite breached the proper level of understanding.
Others can sound like they are just trying too hard to be deep. Even then I guess I find it intriguing to puzzle toward their message.
Tributes to or commentaries on normal things.
On random things. On important things.
On love and happiness and loss and heartbreak.
Tonight (I guess it is morning now) I've mostly been randomly browsing the poems of Pablo Neruda.
Not necessarily cuz he's the best, or a favorite. Just cuz.
Pablo is from Chile. So his poems were translated to English.
Translations.
Crazy. Trying to recreate the same meaning, the same pretty words, the same feeling in a whole new language. Think of whole books that are translated!
Some gets lost, some gets added in the process I'm sure. Comparing different translations of Pablo's poems made me want to read the scriptures in a different language ha. Hopefully all arriving at the same meaning, different words strike you in different ways.
Here are some words of his I liked:
(Ode to the Book)
"When I close a book
I open life...
I won't go clothed in volumes...
they devour
exciting happenings...
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song."
(Some Beasts)
"...From a rainbowing battlement..."
(Poetry)
"And it was at that age...Poetry arrived
in search of me.................
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind."
(Sonnet IX)
"In the wave-strike over unquiet stones...
You and I, my love, ratify the silence..."
(Your Laughter)
"...do not take from me your laughter...
My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life...
Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you...
never [deny] your laughter..."
(The House of Odes)
"...I know who I am
and where my song is going..."
That'll do for tonight ;)
:)
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