Yesterday

All the poets excelling

laugh at my writing

because of the punctuation,

whilst I have beaten my breast

confessing periods and commas,

exclamation marks and colons,

which is to say, incests and crimes

that have sepulchered my words

in a special Middle Ages

of provincial cathedrals.

All those who have Nerudated

have begun to Vallejoize

and before the cock that crew

they’ve gone off with Perse and with Eliot

and have died in their pool.

Whilst so much I go spinning

with my calendar ancestral

more antiquated each day

without discovering but one flower

discovered by everybody,

without inventing but one star

surely already gone out,

whilst I absorbed in its gleam,

drunken with darkness and phosphor,

follow the heavens stupefied.

The next time I return

on my horse through time

I shall get me up to hunt

fitly at the crouch

all that runs or flies:

to inspect it previously

if it’s invented or not invented,

discovered or not discovered:

there shall not escape my net

any coming planet.

Pablo Neruda