The Wide Ocean Poem by Pablo Neruda

The Wide Ocean

Rating: 2.8


Ocean, if you were to give, a measure, a ferment, a fruit
of your gifts and destructions, into my hand,
I would choose your far-off repose, your contour of steel,
your vigilant spaces of air and darkness,
and the power of your white tongue,
that shatters and overthrows columns,
breaking them down to your proper purity.

Not the final breaker, heavy with brine,
that thunders onshore, and creates
the silence of sand, that encircles the world,
but the inner spaces of force,
the naked power of the waters,
the immoveable solitude, brimming with lives.
It is Time perhaps, or the vessel filled
with all motion, pure Oneness,
that death cannot touch, the visceral green
of consuming totality.

Only a salt kiss remains of the drowned arm,
that lifts a spray: a humid scent,
of the damp flower, is left,
from the bodies of men. Your energies
form, in a trickle that is not spent,
form, in retreat into silence.

The falling wave,
arch of identity, shattering feathers,
is only spume when it clears,
and returns to its source, unconsumed.

Your whole force heads for its origin.
The husks that your load threshes,
are only the crushed, plundered, deliveries,
that your act of abundance expelled,
all those that take life from your branches.

Your form extends beyond breakers,
vibrant, and rhythmic, like the chest, cloaking
a single being, and its breathings,
that lift into the content of light,
plains raised above waves,
forming the naked surface of earth.
You fill your true self with your substance.
You overflow curve with silence.

The vessel trembles with your salt and sweetness,
the universal cavern of waters,
and nothing is lost from you, as it is
from the desolate crater, or the bay of a hill,
those empty heights, signs, scars,
guarding the wounded air.

Your petals throbbing against the Earth,
trembling your submarine harvests,
your menace thickening the smooth swell,
with pulsations and swarming of schools,
and only the thread of the net raises
the dead lightning of fish-scale,
one wounded millimetre, in the space
of your crystal completeness.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM

THE OCEAN is where we feel our soul and nature are together.

11 9 Reply
Kenneth Maswabi 14 April 2015

I really enjoyed this piece of art.I am inspired and filled with poetic goose bumps.

12 2 Reply

BARRON PILGRIM IS THE LICENSED OCEAN POET. has written several books of poetry of the ocean.

5 6 Reply

Bursting with liquid beauty!

6 2 Reply
Dr Dillip K Swain 04 September 2022

A great ode to ocean. Your hyperbolic expression makes your poetry special and impactful.

0 0 Reply
Haidee Majola 28 July 2018

A well written ode to the ocean. Very imaginative.

1 3 Reply
Tanner 22 March 2018

Do a ocean Just because poem

3 5 Reply

Barron Pilgrim is the ocean poet, has the title licensed.

6 13 Reply

The ocean poet is Barron pilgrim, a licensed name.

6 12 Reply
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success