In my teaching on Christian spirituality, spiritual formation, and spiritual guidance over the years, I have used a lot of poetry and music. One of my go-to poets has been the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. (1904 – 1973) My favorites are his love poems and his odes to common things given that love and the “quotidian mysteries” of life are central to my take on the spiritual life in general and the Christ-life in particlar. Neruda penned odes in honor of such things as a box of tea, socks, tables, soap, a chestnut, and sadness. (SEE below his Ode to Sadness)

One poem I have used regularly over the last forty years is his poem “Keeping Quiet.” In an increasingly wordy, noisy, and cacophonous world, his words are both an indictment and a prophetic summons. Recently, my love of poetry and music came together when I discovered that in 2021 the choral group Voces8 (do you know their music?) commissioned Donna McKevitt to set Neruda’s poem to music. The result, I submit, is exquisite. See what you think.

pax vobiscum,

~ Dan

KEEPING QUIET

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

by Pablo Neruda. Translated by Alastair Reid
P.S. I have tended to use Stephen Mitchell’s translation.

For ten of the twenty-six years I lived in Southern California, I worked at The Center for Spiritual Development. Our receptionist had grown up and spent many of her youngish adult years in San Francisco. I grew up in Seattle. So there was a certain cloudy sympatico between us as we longed for that occasional “black wing” because we suffered from “so much sun”. On those rare days when the sun had had enough and played hooky, and the sky was a gray canopy that produced occasional rain, it became our ritual at the front desk for us to high-five and say, “Gray at last, gray at last, thank God Almighty, it’s gray at last!”

To Sadness
A la tristeza

Sadness, I need
your black wing,
so much sun, so much honey in the topaz,
each ray smiles
in the meadow
and everything is round light on all sides of me,
everything is an electric bee in the heights.
And so
give me
your black wing,
sister sadness:
I need the sapphire to be
extinguished sometimes and the oblique
mesh of the rain to fall,
the weeping of the earth:
I want
that shattered beam in the estuary,
the vast house in darkness,
and my mother
searching
for paraffin
and filling the lamp
until it gave not light but a sigh.

The night wasn’t born.

The day was sliding
toward its provincial graveyard,
and between the bread and the shadow
I remember
myself
in the window
looking out at what didn’t exist,
what wasn’t happening,
and a black wing of water that came
over that heart which there perhaps
I forgot forever, in the window.

Now I miss
the black light.

Give me your slow blood,
cold
rain,
give me your astonished flight!
Give me back
the key
of the door that was shut,
destroyed.
For a moment, for
a short lifetime,
take the light from me and let me
feel myself
lost and miserable,
trembling among the threads
of twilight,
receiving into my soul
the trembling
hands
of
the
rain.

Pablo Neruda
translated by Stephen Mitchell

♦     ♦     ♦     ♦     ♦

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