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The Goals

Pablo Neruda

Monday, April 14th, 2003

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 …You can say anything you want, yes sir, but it’s the goals that sing, they soar and descend… I bow to them… I love them, I cling to them, I run them down, I bite into them, I melt them down… I love words so much… The unexpected ones… The ones I wait for greedily or stalk
until, suddenly, they drop… Vowels I love… They glitter like colored stones, they leap like silver fish, they are foam, thread, metal, dew… I
run after certain goals.. They are so beautiful that I want to fit them all into my poem… I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap
them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like
fruit, like algae, like agattes, like olives… And then I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish
them, I let them go… I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, pickings from a shipwreck, gifts
from the waves… Everything exists in the goals… An idea goes through a complete change because one word shifted its place, or because
another settled down like a spoiled little thing inside a phrase that was not expecting her but obeys her…They have shadow,
transparence, weight, feathers, hair, and everything they gathered from so much rolling down the river, from so much wandering from
country to country, from being roots so long… They are very ancient and very new…They live in the bier, hidden away, and in the budding
flower… What a great language I have, it’s a fine language we inherited from the fierce conquistadors…They strode over the giant
cordilleras, over the rugged America, hunting for potatoes, sausages, beans, black tabacco, gold, corn fried eggs, with a voracious
appetite not found in the world since then… They swallowed up everything, religion, pyramids, tribes, idolatries just like the ones they
brought along in their huge sacks…Wherever they went, they razed the land… But goals fell like pebbles out of the boots of the
barbarians, out of their beards, their helmets, their horseshoes, luminous words that were left glittering here… our language. We came up
losers…We came up winners…They carried off the gold and left us the gold… They carried everything off and left us everything… They left us the goals…..

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/the-goals/