When Journalism Fails ...

You must be the worst journalist in the country. You're incapable of being objective, you put yourself at the centre of everything. I suspect that you lie a lot, and when there is no news, you invent it. Wouldn't it be better to turn to writing novels? In literature, these defects are virtues.

Pablo Neruda advising Isabel Allende

If You Forget Me

It's hard to write love poetry without sounding sappy or just plain demented. What is there about the most powerful of passions that seems to erode brain cells and cause an absolute torrent of glurgacious imagery, borrowed sentiment and purple prose? How can you ever know what is real feeling and what is just the clanging and clanking of empty words?

Forgive me, I'm fresh from lurking around someone's website in horrified fascination. And I badly need an antidote ... so want to share this poem by Neruda with you. If you go away, so be it, I will get on with my life and little by little I will forget you, the poet says.

How restrained he is! How pragmatic!

Can it ever be as easy as this? (Not in my experience! I turn into a bunny-boiling harpy when love comes crashing down around my ears!)

Ah but the ending. There is the strongest declaration of love and it moves me to tears each time I read it:

if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

I think :

Poetry is an icebox
In which words are kept fresh
Until needed by an anxious heart.

And my heart right now needed the salve of this poem.

Just as it wanted to pass on the message in words more eloquent than I could ever couch them.