I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, Like a puma in the barrens of Nitrate.

— Pablo Neruda

I do not love you except because I love you;I go from loving to not loving you, From waiting to not waiting for you My heart moves from cold to fire.

— Pablo Neruda

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

— Pablo Neruda

If suddenly you do not exist, if suddenly you no longer live, I shall live on. I do not dare, I do not dare to write it, if you die. I shall live on. For where a man has no voice, there, my voice. Where blacks are beaten, I cannot be dead. When my brothers go to prison shall go with them. When victory, not my victory, but the great victory comes, even though I am mute I must speak;I shall see it come even though I am blind. No, forgive me. If you no longer live, if you, beloved, my love, if you have died, all the leaves will fall in my breast, it will rain on my soul night and day, the snow will burn my heart, I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow, my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but shall stay alive, because above all things you wanted me indomitable, and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man but all mankind.

— Pablo Neruda

If You Forget Me want you to know one thing. You know how this is:if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touchier the fire the impalpable ashore the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget memo not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, rememberthat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my Armand my roots will set off to seek another land. Butif each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine.

— Pablo Neruda

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my Armand my roots will set off to seek another land

— Pablo Neruda

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

— Pablo Neruda

I had no more alphabet than the journeying of the swallows, the pure and tiny water of the small, fiery bird that dances rising from the pollen.

— Pablo Neruda

I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair

— Pablo Neruda

I have named you queen. There are taller than you, taller. There are purer than you, purer. There are lovelier than you, lovelier. But you are the queen. When you go through the streets No one recognizes you. No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks At the carpet of red gold That you tread as you pass, The nonexistent carpet. And when you appear All the rivers sounding my body, bells Shake the sky, And a hymn fills the world. Only you and I, Only you and I, my love, Listen to it.

— Pablo Neruda