summoned by

And it was at that age…Poetry arrived

in search of me. I didn’t know, I didn’t know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don’t know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

—Pablo Neruda, “Poetry,”

Translated by W.S. Merwin