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To the Traveler

 

These stones aren't sad.

Within them lives gold,

they have the seeds of planets,

they have bells in their depths,

gloves of iron, marriages

of time with amethysts:

on the inside laughing with rubies,

nourishing themselves from lightening.

 

Because of this, traveler, pay attention

to the hardships of the road,

to the mysteries on the walls.

 

I know this at great cost,

that all life is not outward

nor all death within,

and that the age writes letters

with water and stone for no one,

so that no one knows,

so that no one understands anything.

 

Pablo Neruda (trans. by Dennis Maloney)

 

 

Stephen Wilder