Poema 20

Another video poem from the Moving Poetry Series (Four Seasons Productions). The setting is a tango bar in Argentina in 1922 and the poem is Poema 20 by Pablo Neruda.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.

Stealing sugar from the castle

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see
Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

From My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems (2005), by Robert Bly.