POETRY CORNER: Pablo Neruda, "Oda a la critica"

Oda a la critica

I wrote down five verses:
one green,
one shaped like a breadloaf,
the third like a house going up,
the fourth one, a ring,
the fifth one
small as a lightning flash…

Then came the critics: one deaf.
and one gifted with tongues,
and others and others:
the blind and the hundred-eyed,
the elegant ones
in red pumps and carnations,
other decently clad
like cadavers. . .
some coiled in the forehead
of Marx or thrashing about in his whiskers;
others were English,
just English. . .

--Pablo Neruda, translated by Ben Belitt
(from “Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda.”
New York: Grove Press, 1963.)