• The word was born in the blood, grew in the dark body, beating, and took flight through the lips and the mouth. Farther away and nearer still, still it came from dead fathers and from wondering races, from lands which had turned to stone, lands weary of their poor tribes, for when grief took to the roads the people set out and arrived and married new land and water to grow their words again. And so this is the inheritance; this is the wavelength which connects us with dead men and the dawning of new beings not yet come to light.

    Pablo Neruda: The word
was born in the blood,
grew in the dark body, beating,
and took flight through the lips and the mouth.
Farther away and nearer
still, still it came
from dead fathers and from wondering races,
from lands which had turned to stone,
lands weary of their poor tribes,
for when grief took to the roads
the people set out and arrived
and married new land and water
to grow their words again.
And so this is the inheritance;
this is the wavelength which connects us
with dead men and the dawning
of new beings not yet come to light.
    Pablo Neruda, Ilan Stavans, Robert Bly (2007). “I explain a few things: selected poems”, Farrar Straus & Giroux