The Month of June, poem by Pablo Neruda

THE MONTH OF JUNE
by Pablo Neruda

Green was the silence, 
wet was the light
the month of June
trembled like a butterfly. 

SOURCE: 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda

IMAGE: “Little Butterfly” by Angela Doelling. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was the pen name of the Chilean poet, diplomat and politician Neftali Ricardo ReyesBasoalto. He chose his pseudonym after Czech poet Jan Neruda. In 1971, Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda often wrote in green ink because it was his personal symbol of desire and hope. Gabriel García Márquez called him “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.”

Ode to the Watermelon, poem by Pablo Neruda

ODE TO THE WATERMELON (Excerpt)
by Pablo Neruda 

…the round, magnificent,
star-filled watermelon.
It’s a fruit from the thirst-tree.
It’s the green whale of the summer.
The dry universe
all at once
given dark stars
by this firmament of coolness
lets the swelling
fruit
come down:
its hemispheres open
showing a flag
green, white, red,
that dissolves into
wild rivers, sugar,
delight!
Jewel box of water, phlegmatic
queen
of the fruitshops,
warehouse
of profundity, moon
on earth!
You are pure,
rubies fall apart
in your abundance,
and we
want
to bite into you,
to bury our
face
in you, and
our hair, and
the soul!
When we’re thirsty
we glimpse you
like
a mine or a mountain
of fantastic food,
but
among our longings and our teeth
you change
simply
into cool light
that slips in turn into
spring water
that touched us once
singing.
And that is why
you don’t weigh us down
in the siesta hour
that’s like an oven,
you don’t weigh us down,
you just
go by
and your heart, some cold ember,
turned itself into a single
drop of water.

              (translated by Robert Bly)

Photo: “Watermelons” by Kumon