love poems by pablo neruda

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Sonnet LXXXI

And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.

Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.

The night turns on its invisible wheels,

and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,

we will go together, over the waters of time.

No one else will travel through the shadows with me,

only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists

and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray

wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries

me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.

Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

Sonnet XXV

Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:

I wavered through the streets, among

objects:

nothing mattered or had a name:

the world was made of air, which waited,

I knew rooms full of ashes,

tunnels where the moon lived,

rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',

questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,

fallen abandoned, and decayed:

inconceivably alien, it all

belonged to someone else - to no one:

till your beauty and your poverty

filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.