The Passionate POETRY of PABLO

PABLO NERUDA, that is.

I first came across his work in the film IL POSTINO,
a decade ago.

After scouring bookstores all over Manila,
I finally found a slim volume of
“Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair”
half-hidden, dusty, and ignored.



The book hasn’t left my side since.
It's the literary equivalent of a Barry White CD,
an essential for seaside seductions.


“Leaning into the afternoons...
I cast my sad nets toward your oceanic eyes.”


A few months after I found the Neruda book,
my then girlfriend arrived from Hong Kong
with the soundtrack CD of Il Postino;

It Blew Our Minds.
And I treasure the CD to this very day.

Interspersed with the sun-drenched musical score,
are the poems of Neruda,
as read by some of world's the best actors & actresses,
whose unique voices lend even more drama
to Pablo's passionate odes to sensuousness:

1. Morning - Sting
2. Poetry - Miranda Richardson
3. Leaning Into Afternoons - Wesley Snipes
4. Poor Fellows - Julia Roberts
5. Ode To The Sea - Ralph Fiennes
6. Fable Of The Mermaid & The Drunks - Ethan Hawke
7. Ode To The Beautiful Nude - Rufus Sewell
8. I Like You To Be Still - Glenn Close
9. Walking Around - Samuel L. Jackson
10. Tonight I Can Write - Andy Garcia
11. Adonic Angela - William Dafoe
12. If You Forget Me - Madonna
13. Integrations - Vincent Perez
14. And Now You're Mine - Julia Roberts & Andy Garcia





we live in a cynical world, folks.
a cynical, cynical world.

but you have to believe:
Romance isn't Dead.

here's proof;
bask in the brilliance of Pablo Neruda's
"Tonight I Can Write":



Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and 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.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry 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 tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
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.
As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain,
but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.