Ode to the Hummingbird

Pablo Neruda

find our more about Pablo Neruda here at the Poetry Foundation

The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drip
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming resume,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!

Oh
tiny
living
lightning,
when
you hover
in the air,
you are
a body of pollen,
a feather
or hot coal,
I ask you:
What is your substance?
Perhaps during the blind age
of the Deluge,
within fertility’s
mud,
when the rose
crystallized
in an anthracite fist,
and metals matriculated
each one in
a secret gallery
perhaps then
from a wounded reptile
some fragment rolled,
a golden atom,
the last cosmic scale,
a drop of terrestrial fire
took flight,
suspending your splendor,
your iridescent,
swift sapphire.

You doze
on a nut,
fit into a diminutive blossom;
you are an arrow,
a pattern,
a coat-of-arms,
honey’s vibrato, pollen’s ray;
you are so stouthearted–
the falcon
with his black plumage
does not daunt you:
you pirouette,
a light within the light,
air within the air.
Wrapped in your wings,
you penetrate the sheath
of a quivering flower,
not fearing
that her nuptial honey
may take off your head!

From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of our girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering
from torrid California
to Patagonia’s whistling,
bitter wind.
You are a sun-seed,
plumed
fire,
a miniature
flag
in flight,
a petal of silenced nations,
a syllable
of buried blood,
a feather
of an ancient heart,
submerged

Keeping Quiet

By Pablo Neruda

translator unknown

A biography is here at the Poetry Foundation

 

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves,
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

To the foot from its child

By Pablo Neruda (trans. Alistair Reid)

Biography at the Poetry Foundation

 

The child’s foot is not yet aware that it’s a foot,

and would like to be a butterfly or an apple.

But in time, stones and bits of glass,

streets, ladders,

and the paths in the rough earth

go on teaching the foot that it cannot fly,

cannot be a fruit bulging on the branch.

Then, the child’s foot

is defeated, falls

in the battle,

is a prisoner

condemned to live in a shoe.

Bit by bit, in that dark,

it grows to know the world in its own way,

out of touch with its fellow, enclosed,

feeling out life like a blind man.

These soft nails

of quartz, bunched together,

grow hard, and change themselves

into opaque substance, hard as horn,

and the tiny, petaled toes of the child

grow bunched and out of trim,

take on the form of eyeless reptiles

with triangular heads, like worms.

Later, they grow calloused

and are covered

with the faint volcanoes of death,

a coarsening hard to accept.

But this blind thing walks

without respite, never stopping

for hour after hour,

the one foot, the other,

now the man’s,

now the woman’s,

up above,

down below,

through fields, mines,

markets, ministries,

backward,

far afield, inward,

forward, this foot toils in its shoe,

scarcely taking time to bare itself in love or sleep;

it walks, they walk,

until the whole man chooses to stop.

And then it descended

underground, unaware,

for there, everything, everything was dark.

It never knew it had ceased to be  foot

of if they were burying it so that it could fly

or so that it could become

an apple.