Oh, Earth, Wait For Me by Pablo Neruda

One of the best books I've ever read in my life.  Defies genre and transports the reader...  "The Wood Wife" by Terri Windling.

Oh, Earth, Wait For Me

By Pablo Neruda

Return me, oh sun,
to my wild destiny,
rain of the ancient wood
bring me back the aroma and the swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp at the river-margins,
the smell of the larch tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded restlessness
of the towering araucaria.

Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.

~Pablo Neruda

(Poem excerpted in “The Wood Wife” by Terri Windling, pages 130, 131)

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Evening

 

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

 

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

 

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternatively stone in you and star.

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

 

Excerpted from "The Wood Wife" by Terri Windling, pages 131, 132

 

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Please, please, please...this is my burning desire:  "Return me, oh sun, to my wild destiny..."