Poor Creatures!

What it takes on this planet
to love each other in peace:
all the world examines the sheets,
all of them trouble your love.

And they say terrible things
about a man and a woman
who, after lots of vacillations,
and lots of deliberations,
do something incomparable,
fall together into one bed.

I ask myself if the frogs
stake out, sneeze at, themselves,
whether they whisper in ponds
against the outlaw frogs
against the joy of spawn.
I ask myself if the birds
make bird enemies
and if the bull listens to oxen
before he pays court to the cows.

Now the streets have eyes,
the parks have police,
the hotels have their spys,
the windows note down names,
troops and guns are sent out
resolute against love,
working incessantly
the throats and the ears,
and a guy and his girl
are forced to burst into flower
while fleeing on a bike.

- Pablo Neruda