The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Poetry

The Saddest Love- Pablo Neruda

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Tonight I stumbled onto a poem by Pablo Neruda that caught my attention. It tells a story that is filled with rich imagery and emotion

“I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: “The night is full of stars,and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance.”

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.

How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.To think I don’t have her. To feel that I’ve lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn’t keep her.The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That’s all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else’s. She will be someone else’s. As she once belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me, and this may be the last poem I write for her.”

Crossposted here.

All Of Your Work Crumbles Into Dust

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandias

“I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Death, be not proud
John Donne

“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”