Thanks to all of the contributions so far. It certainly seems as if this thread may have tapped into an underlying love of poetry that has always been here on these forums but never really front and centre and for that alone I'm glad this thread was created.
Now as I stated at the outset, I'm not particularly strong in my knowledge of Poetry but one poet who hails from South America and been named by several critics as perhaps the greatest poet of them all is the former winner of the Nobel Prize, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. As I have a particular fondness for Latin American literature it probably comes as no surprise that I stumbled across its best known poet in my travels.
Here's a sample of Neruda's prose. A number of the poems are a little long to post here, so I hope you enjoy this very small sample.
[FONT=Comic Sans MS,sans-serif]I crave your mouth...
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
[/FONT]
Leaning into the afternoon
Leaning into the afternoon, I cast my saddened nets,
towards your oceanic eyes.
There, in the highest fire, my solitude unrolls and ignites,
arms flailing like a drowning man’s.
I send out crimson flares across your distant eyes,
that swell like the waves, at the base of a lighthouse.
You only guard darkness, far-off woman of mine,
from your gaze the shore of trepidation sometimes emerges.
Leaning towards afternoon, I fling my saddened nets,
into the sea, your eyes of ocean trouble.
The night-birds peck at the early stars,
that glitter as my soul does, while it loves you.
The night gallops, on its mare of shadows,
spilling blue silken tassels of corn, over the fields.
March days return with their covert light
March days return with their covert light,
and huge fish swim through the sky,
vague earthly vapours progress in secret,
things slip to silence one by one.
Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,
you reunite the lives of the sea to that of fire,
grey lurchings of the ship of winter
to the form that love carved in the guitar.
O love, O rose soaked by mermaids and spume,
dancing flame that climbs the invisible stairway,
to waken the blood in insomnia’s labyrinth,
so that the waves can complete themselves in the sky,
the sea forget its cargoes and rages,
and the world fall into darkness’s nets.
