Valentine’s Day is celebrated internationally as ‘Lover’s Day’.
Poems are often shared as a way to express that which we love.
This year, I’ve turned to Chilean Poet Pablo Neruda.
Neruda was a prolific poet, a political and social activist, and an international diplomat.
He had a wonderful sense of humour and wrote collections of love and life. Neruda also wrote many odes to celebrate simple daily objects that may be taken for granted, like tomatoes, salt and socks … and bicycles!
Neruda is regarded as one of the most influential voices in contemporary poetry.
He was born 1904, died 1973, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Pablo Neruda is the focus of the 1994 Spanish speaking film Il Postino (The Postman).
This is a gorgeous film in its own right, only made better by having the lead character delivering love poems by bicycle!
Perfecto!
So for all the lovers of bicycles – and the people who ride them, here is Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Bicycles.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Enjoy!
Ode to Bicycles
I was walking
down
a sizzling road:
the sun popped like
a field of blazing maize,
the
earth
was hot,
an infinite circle
with an empty
blue sky overhead.
A few
bicycles
passed
me by,
the only
insects
in
that dry
moment of summer,
silent,
swift,
translucent;
they
barely stirred
the air.
Workers
and girls
were riding to their
factories,
giving
their eyes
to summer,
their heads to the sky,
sitting on the
hard
beetle backs
of the whirling
bicycles
that whirred
as they rode by
bridges, rosebushes, brambles
and midday.
I thought about
the boys
wash up,
sing, eat, raise
a cup
of wine
in honor
of love
and life,
and waiting
at the door,
the bicycle,
stilled,
because
only moving
does it have a soul,
and fallen there
it isn’t
a translucent insect
humming
through summer
but
a cold
skeleton
that will return to
life
only
when it’s needed,
when it’s light,
that is,
with
the
resurrection
of each day.
