Fully Empowered

That's Pablo Neruda's book (translated by Alastair Reid) which is the nth gift for myself. And this is where I'm taking my cue for what I'm going to do in 2006: re-start, begin again, but not without remembering lessons learned. Like mantra, the poem, "Past" shall be my guide.

Past
Pablo Neruda

We have to discard the past
and, as one builds
floor by floor, window by window,
and the building rises,
so do we keep shedding --
first, broken tiles,
then proud doors,
until, from the past,
dust falls
as if it would crash
against the floor,
smoke rises
as if it were on fire,
and each new day
gleams
like an empty
plate.
There is nothing, there was always nothing.
It all has to be filled
with a new, expanding
fruitfulness;
then, down
falls yesterday
as in a well
falls yesterday's water,
into the cistern
of all that is now without a voice, without fire.
It is difficult
to get bones used
to disappearing,
to teach eyes
to close,
but
we do it
unwittingly.
Everything was alive,
alive, alive,alive
like a scarlet fish,
but time
passed with cloth and darkness
and kept wiping away
the flash of the fish.
Water water water,
the past goes on falling
although it keeps a grip
on thorns
and on roots.
It went, it went, and now
memories mean nothing.
Now the heavy eyelid
shut out the light of the eye
and what was once alive
is now no longer living;
what we were, we are not.
And with words, although the letters
still have transparency and sound,
they change, and the mouth changes;
the same mouth is now another mouth;
they change, lips, skin, circulation;
another soul took on our skeleton;
what once was in us now is not.
It left, but if they call, we reply
"I am here," and we realize we are not,
that what was once, was and is lost,
lost in the past, and now does not come back.