From Pablo Neruda Sonnet 17 (second stanza)

You are not a mirror where reflected, I,
can affirm myself. You are not a watercolored love
or honeysuckled dusk, never soft as dew; but you
are oaken-rooted, self-cathedraled, but as
air-balloons your being brim-fill me with the
honesty of night, with promises of tea-plant
fragrance picked by young Darjeeling girls, and that
secrecy of the morning hale that never
fell. You are not the melody of blooms,

and neither stem from muslin nor from silk but
from the strength of leather; from a breath that carries
craving, decisive roads for me to trace. Since in
your voice there is a bell that in itself
is a hulking lighthouse; you are like the
velvetest of nights when you can follow light,
rhythmic flashes, heartbeats in the brightness of
above, your clouded brow the thunder barely hidden
therefore so much more than flowers.

You are the grace of autumn winds and thanks
to you I sleep-walk very close to
crevasses of ambiguity, and filled with your
never-promised gaze, I mimic in an almost love
the trapeze artist that clings to ropes in a
manic tension at the sullen face of certain
death, and as a fall before she meet the solid
ground you are the heat of kilns, a fragrance

from the leaves of nightshade darkly risen,
a graveyard of concussions, yet from
you I’m veined; you are my warmth at night, the
reason that I barefoot walk on barren earth
you are a purpose, a parasite that lives,
consumes me, burning cold and darkly
we together are the embers of each other, destroyers in
possessions and in a break of vows my
hands are wailing for conclusion in your body.

Today it is Open Link at dVerse with a live session on Saturday hosted by Sannaa. I missed the Golden Shovel last Thursday. When I checked what I wrote last time we had that I decided to do some minor tweaking to my poem from then and repost it under a new name. Enjoy.

May 7, 2026