AS I read the poems by Pablo Neruda
I realized, he has become immortal
the poet or the poetic voice
is of old, never the new
the young
it is seldom a celebration of the clean
unstained
Always, it is a lyrical lament
of existence
the questions, the passing and decaying
of life, of youth of beauty
That voice of old, extends beyond our own history
it is the earth we stand on
the material aspects
and the spiritual.
Yet it is the passing of time
the fading of things
memories
even stories
we lose in the wheel of time
and the writing, erasing and rewriting of history
The forgetting and the incomplete remembering
of our pasts
our previous lives, those skeletons
decomposed flesh
once the bearer of poems
music, now left whispering
some strain to hear
cry at night to discover that lost tune
a certain musician before he became reborn as Mozart composed
and so God watches
as we sing, laugh, cry and die
on our merry-go-round
Still the poetic voice speaks
sings the same old ancient tunes
the very first sounds uttered by cavemen were poems
and the first cry of the new born a song
still the same lullaby sung by the rivers
as we learn the names of things
so too we forget the poetic tapestry underlying our existence
the shallow mask of naming things made the poetic obscure
And yet, poems cannot escape the realm of the names
all it does is try to excavate the things beneath the names
a slow and painful process that of recall of the long lost
floating spirits of poetry still floating in the rain
the total recall at our instance of birth
and then the slow forgetting
only the occasional poems makes us cry for unknown reasons
even our hearts fail to comprehend
as if something very very old and ancient is sitting at our doorstep
all the while having been there
in its myriad of forms becoming suddenly
visible, real and unforgettable
and then as if suddenly waking from an important dream
the poem ends