Triangles- Pablo Neruda
Over the enormous ocean which extended
In winter like a green beast.
Everything just lay there, the silence,
The unfolding gray, the heavy light
Of space, some land now and then.
Over everything there was passing
A flight
And another flight
Of dark birds, winter bodies
Trembling triangles
Whose wings,
Frantically flapping, hardly
Can carry the gray cold, the desolate days
From one place to another
Along the coast of Chile.
I am here while from one sky to another
The trembling of the migratory birds
Leaves me sunk inside myself, inside my own matter
Like an everlasting well
Dug by an immovable spiral.
Now they have disappeared
Black feathers of the sea
Iron birds
From steep slopes and rock piles
Now at noon
I am in front of emptiness. It’s a winter
Space stretched out
And the sea has put
Over its blue face
A bitter mask.
I am to read Migracion in Spanish to a group of poets in June. I see the ecoes in your poem. I'm not a poet; I study the language and can pronounce it acceptably. I do like the sound of it when I exaggerate the "rr's" and lisp the "d's". But the imagery takes time to accommodate. I get the source and the destination: icy rocks of Chile's "foot" to the bare, guano-stained rocks, maybe off the Atacama coast. And the birds are passing by, as a single fluttering body, his seaside vantage, perhaps his house on Isla Negra. White birds, I would think? but Neruda may not say so, unless "the dark decision" says it. I don't understand, quite, references to the unit of fire, latitude of iron and snow, the bloody sun, the engulfing truth of an apparent arrow, etc. And, exactly what the poet feels as he watches; that meaning is clearer in yours. Thank you.
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