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A Nobel Prize-winning poem borrowed, rebuilt, and made urgent. Craig Santos Perez takes the exact shape of Neruda's Sonnet XVII — the structure, the rhythm, the logic of love — and fills it with rare earth metals, vanishing species, conflict diamonds, and rising seas.
The result is a love poem that can no longer pretend to exist outside the planet it's on. A love that is urgent, like an endangered habitat. A love that is organic, without pesticides. And in its final couplet — a perfect echo of Neruda — two people become indistinguishable not just from each other, but from the warming world they share.
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Love in a Time of Climate Change
I don't love you as if you were rare earth metals,
conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause war.
I love you as one loves the most vulnerable species:
urgently, between the habitat and its loss.
I love you as one loves the last seed saved within a vault,
gestating the heritage of our roots,
and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens from its fruit
still lives sweetly on my tongue.
I love you without knowing how or when this world will end.
I love you organically, without pesticides.
I love you like this because we'll only survive
in the nitrogen rich compost of our embrace,
so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,
so close that your sea rises with my heat.
Craig Santos Perez · recycling Pablo Neruda's "Sonnet XVII"
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