Just Look

from Forget About Me

Among the things the sea throws up,
let us hunt for the most petrified,
violet claws of crabs, 
little skulls of dead fish,
smooth syllables of wood,
small countries of mother-of-pearl;
let us look for what the sea undid
insistently, carelessly,
what it broke up and abandoned,
and left behind for us...


...Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shores of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
There the faint signs are left,
coins of time and water,
debris, celestial ash
and the irreplaceable rapture
of sharing in th e labor
of solitude and the sand. 


by Pablo Neruda