On our 8th Year

Today I’d like to share with you a poem I did not write.

It’s a translation of a love sonnet, number 33, by Pablo Neruda. This is sonnet my friend Lisa read for Colin and I at our wedding, 8 years ago today. A couple months after we married, we flew off on our adventure together to London.

This October, Colin and I will have been together 10 years. I can’t remember even who I was 10 years ago… or how I had the insight to slow down long enough to get a really good look at this kind, wonderful man. I am so grateful for the period of sweetness and abundance he has ushered into my life.

Happy Anniversary, Colin…

Love, we’re going home now,
Where the vines clamber over the trellis:
Even before you, the summer will arrive,
On its honeysuckle feet, in your bedroom.

Our nomadic kisses wandered over all the world:
Armenia, dollop of disinterred honey:
Ceylon, green dove: and the YangTse with its old
Old patience, dividing the day from the night.

And now, dearest, we return, across the crackling sea
Like two blind birds to their wall,
To their nest in a distant spring:

Because love cannot always fly without resting,
Our lives return to the wall, to the rocks of the sea:
Our kisses head back home where they belong.

— by Pablo Neruda, translated by Stephen Tapscott,

from “Cien sonetos de amor

E Howard C Phillips Montmarte

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