I Ask for Silence

By: Pablo Neruda

Now if you’d leave me in peace.

Now if you’d get on without me.

I am going to close my eyes

And I only want five things,

five favorite roots.

The first is love without end.

The second is to see autumn.

I cannot be without leaves

flying away and returning to earth.

Third is grave winter,

the rain I loved, the caress

of a fire in a wilderness of cold.

In fourth place is summertime

round like a watermelon.

The fifth thing is your eyes,

Matilde, my love, my beloved,

I don’t want to sleep without your eyes,

I don’t want to be without you seeing me:

I’d trade springtime

for your gaze still upon me.

My friends, all of that is what I want.

It’s nearly nothing and almost everything.

And now if you wish you may leave.

So much have I lived that one day

you’ll have to make yourselves forget me,

erasing the blackboard of me:

my heart was endless.

But just because I ask for silence

don’t go thinking I’m about to die:

au contraire!:

it so happens I am going to be lived.

It just so happens that I am and I keep being.

I will not be dying for within me

grains will grow,

first the kernels that break through

the ground to see light,

but mother earth is dark:

and inside me I am dark:

I am like a well in whose waters

the nighttime leaves her stars

and goes on alone through the fields.

This is about my having lived so much

that I want to live another much.

Never have I felt such resonance,

never have I had so many kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.

The light takes flight with her bees.

Leave me alone with this day.

I ask permission to be born.