Octavio Paz: Mexican poet, teacher, and diplomat

• The Street
• Here is a long and silent street.
• I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
• and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
• trampling the silent stones and the dry leaves.
• Someone behind me also tramples, stones, leaves:
• if I slow down, he slows;
• if I run, he runs I turn: nobody.
• Everything dark and doorless,
• only my steps aware of me,
• I turning and turning among these corners
• which lead forever to the street
• where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,
• where I pursue a man who stumbles
• and rises and says when he sees me: nobody. 

• Summit and Gravity
• There’s a motionless tree
• And another one coming forward
• A river of trees
• Hits my chest
• The green surge
• Is good fortune
• You are dressed in red
• You are
• The seal of the scorched year
• The carnal firebrand
• The star fruit
• In you like sun
• The hour rests
• Above an abyss of clarities
• The height is clouded by birds
• Their beaks construct the night
• Their wings carry the day
• Planted in the crest of light
• Between firmness and vertigo
• You are
• Transparent balance.

• Axis
• Through the conduits of blood
• my body in your body
• spring of night
• my tongue of sun in your forest
• your body a kneading trough
• I red wheat
• Through conduits of bone
• I night I water
• I forest that moves forward
• I tongue
• I body
• I sun-bone
• Through the conduits of night
• spring of bodies
• You night of wheat
• you forest in the sun
• you waiting water
• you kneading trough of bones
• Through the conduits of sun
• my night in your night
• my sun in your sun
• my wheat in your kneading trough
• your forest in my tongue
• Through the conduits of the body
• water in the night
• your body in my body
• Spring of bones
• Spring of suns 

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a Mexican poet and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. Besides writing and teaching, Paz also served as a Mexican diplomat in the early 1940s with assignments in New York, Paris, India, Tokyo and Geneva. Influenced by his grandfather’s extensive library, Paz became enamored with literature and began writing verse as a teen. He published his first poem at the age of 17 and his first volume of verse when he was 19. Many of his poems address and engage the tensions present in Mexico’s national identity as well as those present in human relationships, especially between the sexes.