Pablo Neruda

Chile
12 Jul 1904 // 23 Sep 1973
Poet

Before I Loved You

Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own,
I wavered through the streets, among objects,
Nothing mattered or had a name,
The world was made of air, which waited.

I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.

Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all

Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

Pablo Neruda, in '100 Love Sonnets'
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On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
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