In honor of Valentine's Day, here are a couple love sonnets Pablo Neruda wrote for his wife, Matilde Urrutia. These are two of the five sonnets from Cien sonetos de amor (100 Love Sonnets) that Peter Lieberson used in Neruda Songs which he composed for his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
VIII
Si No Fuera Porque Tus Ojos Tienen Color De Luna
If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,
not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up throught the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,
oh, my dearest, I could not love you so!
but when I hold you I hold everything that is—
sand, time, the tree of the rain,
everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.
LXXXI
Ya Eres Mía. Reposa Con Tu Sueño En Mi Sueño.
And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my
dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.
No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
Only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move
after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
