Pido silencio [English translation]

Leave me alone, now.

Get used to it now, without me.

I am going to close my eyes.

And I only want to hear five things,

five favourite roots.

One is unending love.

The second is to see the fall.

I can´t be myself without the leaves

flying and coming back down to earth.

The third is the dire winter,

the rain that I loved, the caress

of the fire in the cold of the wilderness.

In fourth place, the summer

round as a watermelon.

The fifth thing are your eyes,

my Matilde, my well-beloved,

I don´t want to sleep without your eyes,

I don´t wat to be without you looking at me,

I´d trade spring in

if you would keep looking at me.

My friends, this is all I want.

It´s almost nothing, and it´s almost everything.

Now, if you want, you may go.

I´ve lived so much that one day

you will simply have to forget me,

erasing me from the blackboard,

my heart was neverending.

But just because I ask for silence

don´t think I´m about to die:

quite the opposite, in fact,

It just so happens, that I´m going to live myself.

It just so happens, that I am and I keep going.

It won´t be, then, nothing else but that

inside of me, cereals will grow,

first the grains that burst free

of the earth to see the light,

bur mother earth is dark

and inside I am dark too:

I am like a well in whose waters

the night leaves its stars

and treads on, alone, in the fields.

It´s that I have lived so much

that I want to live just as much again.

I never felt so full of sound,

I never had so many kisses to give.

Now, as ever, it´s early

and the light flies with its bees.

Leave me alone with the day,

I ask for permission to be born.

• Artist:Pablo Neruda