On The Blue Shore of Silence

On The Blue Shore of Silence - Pablo Neruda

“I need the sea because it teaches me, 
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness, 
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence, 
or only its harsh voice or its shining 
suggestion of fishes and ships. 
The fact is that until I fall asleep, 
in some magnetic way I move in 
the university of the waves.

It’s not simply the shells crunched 
as if some shivering planet 
were giving signs of its gradual death; 
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment, 
the stalactite from a sliver of salt, 
and the great god out of a spoonful.

What it taught me before, I keep. It’s air 
ceaseless wind, water and sand.

It seems a small thing for a young man, 
to have come here to live with his own fire; 
nevertheless, the pulse that rose 
and fell in its abyss, 
the cracking of the blue cold, 
the gradual wearing away of the star, 
the soft unfolding of the wave 
squandering snow with its foam, 
the quiet power out there, sure 
as a stone shrine in the depths, 
replaced my world in which were growing 
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion, 
and my life changed suddenly: 
as I became part of its pure movement.”