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 him, and sometimes he loved me too.

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

I kissed him again and again under the endless sky.

He loved me, sometimes I loved him too.

How could one not have loved his great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

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

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

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

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

The night is starry and he 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 him.

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

My heart looks for him, and he is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

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

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

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

Another's. He will be another's. As he was before my kisses.

His voice, his bright body. His infinite eyes.

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

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

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

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost him.

Though this be the last pain that he makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for him.

~~~

by Pablo Neruda

translated by W.S. Merwin

*i changed the pronouns from feminine to masculine.

**original poem here.