daily poem: Always, Sweetness / Pablo Neruda

I'm finding writing in the kitchen quite inspiring today, consequently The Portmanteau has been serving poems for the ravenous, sensory poems that play on the way language tastes on your tongue, food for thought, words that slake thirst and satisfy hunger. "Poetry," says Lucille Clifton, "speaks to something in us that so wants to be filled. It speaks to the great hunger of the soul."

Here's a wonderful poem from Pablo Neruda, good enough to eat.

Always, Sweetness
Pablo Neruda

Why such harsh machinery?
Why, to write down the stuff and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed up in gold,
or in old and fearful stone?

I want verses of felt or feather
which scarcely weigh, mild verses
with the intimacy of beds
where people have loved and dreamed.
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.

Verses of pastry which melt
into milk and sugar in the mouth,
air and water to drink,
the bites and kisses of love.
I long for eatable sonnets,
poems of honey and flour.

Vanity keeps prodding us
to lift ourselves skyward
or to make deep and useless
tunnels underground.
So we forget the joyous
love-needs of our bodies.
We forget about pastries.
We are not feeding the world.

In Madras a long time since,
I saw a sugary pyramid,
a tower of confectionery -
one level after another,
and in the construction, rubies,
and other blushing delights,
medieval and yellow.

Someone dirtied his hands
to cook up so much sweetness.

Brother poets from here
and there, from earth and sky,
from Medellin, from Veracruz,
Abyssinia, Antofagasta,
do you know the recipe for honeycombs?

Let’s forget about all that stone.

Let your poetry fill up
the equinoctial pastry shop
our mouths long to devour -
all the children’s mouths
and the poor adults’ also.
Don’t go on without seeing,
relishing, understanding
all these hearts of sugar.

Don’t be afraid of sweetness.

With or without us,
sweetness will go on living
and is infinitely alive,
forever being revived,
for it’s in a man’s mouth,
whether he’s eating or singing,
that sweetness has its place.

Translated from the Spanish by Alastair Reid


Read more Pablo Neruda here. // Buy The Essential Neruda here.

Photo by Veronika Lake