I fell in love with this poem that I came across a while ago.
It made me look a little closer to the author Pablo Neruda, and I- as growing up in Norway did not have any slightest idea who this person was. Then I found even more great poetry and the background of a Nobel-winning poet in Spanish language:
Pablo Neruda is Latin America’s most well-known and most read poet of the twentieth century. He was born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto on July 12, 1904, in the town of Parral, Chile. His father was a railroad worker and his mother died shortly after giving birth to him. When he was sixteen years old he began submitting articles to the literary journal “Selva Austra” using the pseudonym Pablo Neruda. Neruda chose to publish his poetry under a different name because his father adamantly opposed poetry as a career. Neruda quickly began publishing his books of poetry. Along with his literary exploits he studied French and pedagogy at the University of Chile in Santiago.
Neruda began a promising political career and moved to Europe to further that career; however, his writing never took a back seat. Neruda’s poetry can be seen as blueprints for his life. If you follow his poetry in chronological order, you can see every place he has been in his life –the young man full of blooming love, the depressed man writing of his home, the ardent politician, and the old man full-circle back to the rapture and passions of love. Beginning with 1927 until 1935, he was given consulships to many different countries: Burma, Ceylon, Java, Singapore, Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and Madrid. While in Europe, Neruda became a follower of Communism which would color his later poetry and politics.
In 1947 Neruda had to live underground, exiled from his home because of his anti-President González Videla sentiments. Neruda continued his poetry but during this time it expressed his fiery leftist political views. In 1952 he was invited back to Chile and he happily returned home.
In 1971 Pablo Neruda received the Nobel Prize for Literature among other awards.
Pablo Neruda passed way in a hospital in Santiago, Chile on September 23, 1973 from a battle with cancer. The beloved poet was dead, but his poetry would live on forever.
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I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
If I look
At the crystal moon, at the red branch
Of the slow autumn at my window,
If I touch
Near the fire
The impalpable ash
Or the wrinkled body of the log,
Everything carries me to you,
As if everything that exists,
Aromas, light, metals,
Were little boats that sail
Toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
If little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
You forget me
Do not look for me,
For I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
The wind of banners
That passes through my life,
And you decide
To leave me at the shore
Of the heart where I have roots,
Remember
That on that day,
At that hour,
I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off
To seek another land.
But
If each day,
Each hour,
You feel that you are destined for me
With implacable sweetness,
If each day a flower
Climbs up to your lips to seek me,
Ah my love, ah my own,
In me all that fire is repeated,
In me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
My love feeds on your love, beloved,
And as long as you live it will be in your arms
Without leaving mine.
"Soul mates aren`t the ones who make you happiest, no. 
