Poetry

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Stationary Point

I would know nothing, dream nothing:
who will teach my non-being
how to be, without striving to be?

How can the water endure it?
What sky have the stones dreamed?

Immobile, until those migrations
delay at their apogee
and fly on their arrows
toward the cold archipelago.

Unmoved in its secretive life,
like an underground city,
so the days may glide down
like ungraspable dew:
nothing fails, or shall perish,
until we be born again,
until all that lay plundered
be restored with the tread
of the springtime we buried—
the unceasingly stilled, as it lifts
itself out of non-being, even now,
to be flowering bough.

 

"Stationary Point" from Voyages and Homecomings, 1959
Published in Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
Edited and translated by Ben Belitt
Copyright © Fundación Pablo Neruda, 2009

Poems selected by Lars Rydquist, head librarian, Nobel Library of the Swedish Academy