A Light from the Sea
- Pablo Neruda
Once more, the sea light’s
immensity,
the sky-fall
in flagons,
climbing the spume
and the sea-silt:
disturbance of light
in the ocean’s extension,
thunderbolts,
a quarrel of knives,
lights
in the sweltering salts
and the sky,
upright
like a tower of brine on the waters.
Where
do the griefs go?
The breast opens out
like a branch
and its leafage;
light works
in our hearts
like a volley
of butterflies.
There shines
for the day of the sea
all the innocent
presences:
the pebble
embraced
by the wave,
the shipwrecked
debris
of the bottle glass,
glazes
of water,
suavities
honed by the touch
of a star.
There, burn
the
bodies:
bracken and salt
on the men,
the women
all green,
the children
like
pond-weeds,
fish-forms that leap
for the sky.
Should
a window’s
recesses, the bulking of clothing,
a darkening lift of the land
presume
on that dazzle
or disfigure the brightness,
the clarities foam in the bubbles,
light widens a sleeve
and harries the insolent
shadow
in a might of white arms,
altar cloths,
tinsel, in breakers of gold,
in marvels of spindrift
and tumbrils of lilies.
Light ripens its powers in the spaces.
O billow that pierces
without wetting the bather, pivot
and flank of a universe,
regenerate rose
re-arising:
open
each day with your petals
and eyelids,
grant us your cleanly celerities
to widen our onlooking;
bring us to see, in the end,
the seamoving, wave upon wave,
and flower after flower, all the earth.
