Emerging

A man says yes without knowing 

how to decide even what the question is, 

and is caught up, and then is carried along 

and never again escapes from his own cocoon; 

and that’s how we are, forever falling 

into the deep well of other beings; 

and one thread wraps itself around our necks, 

another entwines a foot, and then it is impossible, 

impossible to move except in the well -

nobody can rescue us from other people. 

It seems as if we don’t know how to speak; 

it seems as if there are words which escape, 

which are missing, when have gone away and left us 

to ourselves, tangled up in snares and threads. 

And all at once, that’s it; we no longer know 

what it’s all about, but we are deep inside it, 

and now we will never see with the same eyes 

as once we did when we were children playing. 

Now these eyes are closed to us, 

now our hands emerge from different arms. 

And therefore when you sleep, you are alone in your dreaming, 

and running freely through the corridors 

of one dream only, which belongs to you. 

Oh never let them come to steal our dreams, 

never let them entwine us in our bed. 

Let us hold on to the shadows 

to see if, from our own obscurity, 

we emerge and grope along the walls, 

lie in wait for the light, to capture it, 

till, once and for all time, 

it becomes our own, the sun of every day.

Pablo Neruda

in, Weathering: Poems and Translations

Alastair Reid