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# Keeping Quiet
- URL: https://poetry101.love/keeping-quiet/
- Published: 2022-12-04T20:20:39.000Z
- Updated: 2022-12-04T20:20:39.000Z
- Description: by Pablo Neruda
- Author: Melissa Anderson
- Tags: Pablo Neruda, #Import 2026-11-04 19:11

Now we will count to twelve  
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,  
let’s not speak in any language;  
let’s stop for one second,  
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment  
without rush, without engines;  
we would all be together  
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea  
would not harm whales  
and the man gathering salt  
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,  
wars with gas, wars with fire,  
victories with no survivors,  
would put on clean clothes  
and walk about with their brothers  
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused  
with total inactivity.  
Life is what it is about;  
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded  
about keeping our lives moving,  
and for once could do nothing,  
perhaps a huge silence  
might interrupt this sadness  
of never understanding ourselves  
and of threatening ourselves with death.  
Perhaps the earth can teach us  
as when everything seems dead  
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve  
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Neruda, Pablo. [Extravagaria: A Bilingual Edition](https://www.google.com/books/edition/Extravagaria/eaISLgEACAAJ?hl=en&kptab=getbook&ref=poetry101.love). United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.

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### Why I Chose This Poem

It's just that there was a moment, quite early in the pandemic, where my neighborhood was like this:  
  
 without rush, without engines;  
 we would all be together  
 in a sudden strangeness.

We were all together in the sudden strangeness. And connected by the progress that has allowed disease to travel between continents for centuries and the technology that allows us to never stop threatening.   
  
I feel such sadness. The speaker suggests "Now we will count to twelve" and instead counts alone, bids me to silence, and leaves.