so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow

Well, Sylvia has got a bunch of us digging out our books of poetry to jump on the Neruda bandwagon. If you follow the links, you'll see that it's spread, after the manner of a lot of virulent cliches in a proverbially navigable medium, and so on, but it twigged me.
Pretty much once a year, my mother gives me a book of poetry, usually Latin American poetry. Our relationship was...strained, for a long time, and poetry was one of the few things we could agree on or share. I have one of her old college books from before she dropped out way back when, with her notes in the margins. She never got the degree to "prove" it, but she's got good taste in verse. So Neruda brings me to that--that difficulty, that strain for Home and connection, that you see in a lot of his pastoral stuff, because I miss the relationship I always thought I'd have with my mother, that we still strain for, without letting on to the other how hard it is. He brings me to my pulling for my roots, because if my mother and her parents hadn't worked so hard to assimilate in the U.S., I'd probably have grown up speaking Spanish along with my English, and it's always cut at me how bad my Spanish is, and loving Spanish poetry reminds me of the language's greatness and my inadequacy in the face of it and my pride at coming from the same place it does. It cuts me off from extended family, and from community; ironically, it's a big part of my mestiza identity, that voicelessness, that catch in my throat when I realize I don't know how to say what I want to say, especially when it's I'm yours.

Poetry does this.

Neruda brings me back to a girl I knew in high school, a costarricense exchange student named Andrea who tutored me in Spanish for a while. I was, of course, infatuated, and I use the word "tutored" loosely; Andrea and I would sit together in the library, a meter apart in different chairs most of the time, and read Pablo Neruda to each other, quietly, making eye contact and breaking it, shy teenagers. This was my real education in Spanish; my teachers let me sleep through class so long as I kept acing tests, and I kept acing tests so long as Andrea was willing to gently tell me that my D's were a little too hard, and should have more of a 'th' in them, or that the word I'd just read was not the usual one to use. I began to dream in Spanish. The elaborate code my best friend and I had to talk about people we were crushing on melted away because I only had one person to be breathless about.
After a while, neither of us ever really bringing up what happens between teenagers who spend hours and hours together quietly reading Neruda and making furtive eye contact, I asked her to a dance. It didn't work out. At the very end of the night, we had one dance together, and promised to never forget each other, as teenagers do, and she struggled to translate gentil in order to tell me why I wasn't like anyone else she knew. And then she went back to Costa Rica, and grew up, and I went back to the city limit, and grew up. I still think of this as one of the most fulfilling romantic experiences of my life.

Poetry does this.

As has been pointed out, Neruda has his flaws. His politics are arguable; his love poetry, often solipsistic; his personal life, full of holes; but he was a poet, through and through.
Poetry does something. I was surprised to find writing I had done called "poetry" recently; I hadn't thought of it that way when I wrote it, but as it turns out, it was read as poetry. This is important. How do you know poetry?
You know it because you read it as poetry. Napkin scribblings and fortune cookies are poetry, sometimes. Sometimes poetry comes as sonnets; sometimes it's the perfect haiku written and burned before certain death, and given to the wind; sometimes it's a record in sand. You know it because of what it does to you. You know it because of what it does in you.
It connects you to something. It connects you to your history as sure as the smell of your parents' kitchen or the song you heard once, during a moment of public shame.
Poetry connects me and my mother despite the countless times we've broken each other's hearts, and when I read her reactions to poetry from her twentysomething-age notes in the book I filched, I understand more of why that heartbreak happens. It takes me to my hilarious stint as a would-be Beatnik, reading poetry with gushing sincerity in the only late-night coffeehouse in my hometown, while I came to terms with the sorts of emotions you have to deal with, once you're old enough to read poetry with gushing sincerity. Poetry reminds me of the increasingly elaborate romantic gestures I made, fruitlessly, in my attempts to rescue my first, emotionally abusive, relationship. Poetry does this.
It connects things. You, to your history. Your history, to a great struggle. A great struggle, to a child's picture on a refrigerator. A child's picture to a ragged scar, a scar to a heartbeat, a heartbeat to a death, a death to a simple note, a note to a national breakdown. You know it when you see it. It does something in you. We want to move the planet, we need a lot of things--but we need poets, without a doubt.

With that, here's my contribution to the Neruda meme:

Absence (Ausencia)

I have scarcely left you
when you go in me, crystalline,
or trembling,
or uneasy, wounded by me
or overwhelmed with love, as when your eyes
close upon the gift of life
that without cease I give you.

My love,
we have found each other
thirsty and we have
drunk up all the water and the blood,
we found each other
hungry
and we bit each other
as fire bites,
leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,
keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too
a rose.


Apenas te he dejado,
vas en mí, cristalina
o temblorosa,
o inquieta, herida por mí mismo
o colmada de amor, como cuando tus ojos
se cierran sobre el don de la vida
que sin cesar te entrego.

Amor mío,
nos hemos encontrado
sedientos y nos hemos
bebido toda el agua y la sangre,
nos encontramos
con hambre
y nos mordimos
como el fuego muerde,
dejándonos heridas.

Pero espérame,
guárdame tu dulzura.
Yo te daré también
una rosa.

Pablo Neruda, tr. Donald D. Walsh, from "Los versos del Capitán."