Your Breast is Enough

This poem is by Pablo Neruda The Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner. I love his poems. The way he uses words to conjure up mental images is so distinctive. This poem is from Twenty Love Poems published in 1924. It translates quite well into English but is even better in Spanish. If you can speak Spanish it is worth looking it up in the original language.

Your Breast is Enough.

Your breast is enough for my heart,

and my wings for your freedom.

What was sleeping above your soul will rise

out of my mouth to heaven.

In you is the illusion of each day.

You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.

you undermine the horizon with your absence.

Eternally in flight like a wave.

I have said that you sang in the wind

like the pines and like the masts.

Like them you are tall and taciturn,

and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.

You gather things to you like an old road.

You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.

I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated

that had been sleeping in your soul.