I need the sea because it teaches me.
I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,
if it’s a single wave or its vast existence,
or just its harsh voice or its shining
suggestion of fish and boats.
The fact is that even when I am sleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the University of the waves.
It’s not simply the crunched shells
as if some shivering planet
were giving signs of its gradual death;
no, I reconstruct the day out of a fragment,
the stalactite from a sliver of salt,
and the great God out of a spoonful.
What it taught me before, I keep! It’s air
ceaseless wind, water and sand.
It seems a small thing for a young man,
to have come here to live with his own fire;
nevertheless, the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the crackling of the blue cold,
the gradual collapse of the star
the tender unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power, there, certain
like a stone throne in the depths,
replaced the enclosure in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed abruptly
as I became part of its pure movement.
Pablo Neruda
On the Blue Shore of Silence:
Poems of the Sea