I don’t want to be without you seeing me

Now if you’d leave me in peace.
Now if you’d get on without me.

I am going to close my eyes

And I only want five things,
five favorite roots.

The first is love without end.

The second is to see autumn.
I cannot be without leaves
flying away and returning to earth.

Third is grave winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of a fire in a wilderness of cold.

In fourth place is summertime
round like a watermelon.

The fifth thing is your eyes,
Matilde, my love, my beloved,
I don’t want to sleep without your eyes,
I don’t want to be without you seeing me:
I’d trade springtime
for your gaze still upon me.

My friends, all of that is what I want.
It’s nearly nothing and almost everything.

And now if you wish you may leave.

So much have I lived that one day
you’ll have to make yourselves forget me,
erasing the blackboard of me:
my heart was endless.

But just because I ask for silence
don’t go thinking I’m about to die:
au contraire!:
it so happens I am going to be lived.

It just so happens that I am and I keep being.

I will not be dying for within me
grains will grow,
first the kernels that break through
the ground to see light,
but mother earth is dark:
and inside me I am dark:
I am like a well in whose waters
the nighttime leaves her stars
and goes on alone through the fields.

This is about my having lived so much
that I want to live another much.

Never have I felt such resonance,
never have I had so many kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.
The light takes flight with her bees.

Leave me alone with this day.
I ask permission to be born.

[Pablo Neruda {1904-1973}, 'I ask for silence', trans. by Heidi Fischbach. A version appears in Intimacies. Read Neruda’s original “Pido Silencio”]