This gets me, every time.

TONIGHT I CAN WRITE

 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

 

Write, for example, "The night is shattered

and the blue stars shiver in the distance."

 

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

 

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

 

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

 

What does it matter that my love could not keep her?

The night is shattered and she is not with me.

 

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

 

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

 

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

 

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

 

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.

Her voice; her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

 

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I loved her.

Love is so short, forgetting so long.

                                                                                                                       

 

Pablo Neruda, from Twenty Love Poems: And a Song of Despair