Pablo Neruda

Sonnet VIII: If your eyes were not the color of the moon

If your eyes were not the color of the moon, of a day full  [here, interrupted by the baby waking — continued about 26 hours later ] of a day full of clay, and work, and fire, if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air, if you were not an amber week, not the yellow moment when autumn climbs up through the vines; if you were not that bread the fragrant moon kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky, oh, my dearest, I could not love you so! But when I hold you I hold everything that is — sand, time, the tree of the rain, everything is alive so that I can be alive: without moving I can see it all: in your life I see everything that lives.