Births by Pablo Neruda

Births

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient

about our being,

noting down

numbers, days,

years and months,

hair, and the mouths we kiss,

and that moment of dying

we let pass without a note—

we leave it to others as memory,

or we leave it simply to water,

to water, to air, to time.

Nor do we even keep

the memory of being born,

although to come into being was tumultuous and new;

and now you don’t remember a single detail

and haven’t kept even a trace

of your first light.

It’s well known that we are born.

It’s well known that in the room

or in the wood

or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter

or in the rustling canefields

there is a quite unusual silence,

a grave and wooden moment as

a woman prepares to give birth.

It’s well known that we were all born.

But of that abrupt translation

from not being to existing, to having hands,

to seeing, to having eyes,

to eating and weeping and overflowing

and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,

of that transition, that quivering

of an electric presence, raising up

one body more, like a living cup,

and of that woman left empty,

the mother who is left there in her blood

and her lacerated fullness,

and its end and its beginning, and disorder

tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers

till everything comes together and adds

one knot more to the thread of life,

nothing, nothing remains in your memory

of the savage sea which summoned up a wave

and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.

The only thing you remember is your life.

by Pablo Neruda

(from “Fully Empowered”, translation of “Plenos Poderes” 1962)