Akoot Famous Writers
TO SIT DOWN
Everyone seated
at the table
on a throne
at meetings
in train cars
in a chapel
on the sea
on a plane, in school, in the stadium
everyone, seated or getting ready to sit down
but no one will remember
any chair
that my hands have made.
What happened? Why, if my fates
made me, among other things, to be seated,
why don't they let me
stick four legs
from a dead tree
into a seat, for the support
of my neighbor
who should wait there for the birth
or the death of someone he loved?
(The chair that I couldn't make, that I didn't make,
transforming the style
of the very nature of wood
making a clear, plain apparatus
out of the shadowy ceremonies of the trees)
The circular saw
like a planet
came downward at night
to the earth
and rolled through the forests
of my country
passed by without seeing through my worm-hole
was lost in its own sound
and so that was how I walked
in the aroma
of the sacred forest
without committing aggression with a hatchet
against the trees
without taking into my hands
the decision on the knowledge
of how to cut through thickets
and extract
the chair
of immobility
and to repeat that action
until everyone in the world is seated.
Written by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
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