By Love is the theme par excellence that great poets choose for their compositions. Discover these fascinating verses to dedicate and awaken the deepest emotions.
Expressing love can be as complicated as trying to capture the wind, don’t you think? We struggle to find the right words that actually convey all that we feel in our hearts. So here we are to help you unravel that emotional mess with some short love poems written by top authors.
Short love poems written by Pablo Neruda
Renowned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda left us a vast and passionate lyrical universe that endures over time. His masterfully woven verses explore the complexities of love in all its forms. Dive into Neruda’s poetry and choose the poem that resonates with you the most.
1. Sonnet XVII
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz
or arrow of carnations that spread fire:
I love you as one loves certain dark things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you like the plant that does not bloom and carries
hidden within itself, the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love it lives dark in my body
the tight aroma that rose from the earth.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know how to love any other way,
but in this way that I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand on my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dream.
2. Sonnet XLV
Do not be far from me for a single day, because how,
Because, I can’t tell you, throughout the day,
I will be waiting for you like in the seasons
when the trains fell asleep somewhere.
Don’t leave for an hour because then
At that hour the drops of sleeplessness gather
and maybe all the smoke that is looking for a home
come to kill my lost heart again.
Oh, don’t let your silhouette break in the sand,
Oh, don’t let your eyelids fly away in absence:
Don’t go away for a minute, beloved,
because in that minute you will be so far gone
that I will spend my whole life asking
whether you will come back or leave me dying.
3. Sonnet XCIII
If your chest ever stops,
If something stops burning through your veins,
If your voice leaves your mouth without being a word,
If your hands forget to fly and fall asleep,
Matilde, love, leave your lips half-open,
because that last kiss must last with me,
must remain motionless forever in your mouth,
so that he may also accompany me in my death.
I will die kissing your cold mouth,
embracing the lost bunch of your body,
and searching for the light of your closed eyes.
And so when the earth receives our embrace
We will go confused to a single death
to live forever the eternity of a kiss.
4. Sonnet LXXXIII
It’s good, love, to feel you close to me at night,
invisible in your dream, seriously nocturnal,
while I untangle my worries
as if they were confused networks.
Absent, through dreams your heart sails,
but your body, thus abandoned, breathes
looking for me without seeing me, completing my dream
like a plant that duplicates itself in the shade.
Standing tall, you will be someone else who will live tomorrow,
but from the borders lost in the night,
of this being and non-being in which we find ourselves
Something is coming closer to us in the light of life
as if the seal of the shadow pointed out
with fire his secret creatures.
5. Poem 1
Woman’s body, white hills, white thighs,
you resemble the world in your attitude of surrender.
My wild peasant body undermines you
and makes the son jump from the depths of the earth.
I was alone like a tunnel. Birds fled from me.
and the night entered me with its powerful invasion.
To survive me I forged you as a weapon,
like an arrow in my bow, like a stone in my sling.
But the hour of revenge falls, and I love you.
Body of skin, of moss, of avid and firm milk.
Ah, the vessels of the chest. Ah, the eyes of absence.
Ah, the roses of the pubis. Ah, your slow and sad voice.
My female body, I will persist in your grace.
My thirst, my limitless desire, my indecisive path.
Dark channels where eternal thirst continues,
and the fatigue continues, and the pain infinite.
6. Sonnet XXII
How many times, love, I loved you without seeing you and perhaps without remembering you
without recognizing your gaze, without looking at you, centaur,
in opposite regions, on a burning noon:
you were just the aroma of the cereals that I love.
Maybe I saw you, I guessed you as I passed by raising a glass
in Angol, by the light of the June moon,
or were you the waist of that guitar
that I played in the darkness and it sounded like the immeasurable sea.
I loved you without knowing it, and I searched for your memory.
I entered empty houses with a flashlight to steal your portrait.
But I already knew what it was like. Suddenly
While you were with me I touched you and my life stopped:
before my eyes you were, ruling and reigning over me.
Like a bonfire in the woods, fire is your kingdom.
7. Sonnet XXVII
Naked you are as simple as one of your hands:
smooth, terrestrial, minimal, round, transparent.
You have moon lines, apple paths.
Naked you are thin as naked wheat.
Naked you are blue like the night in Cuba:
you have vines and stars in your hair.
Naked you are round and yellow
like summer in a golden church.
Naked you are as small as one of your nails:
curved, subtle, pink until the day is born
and you get into the underground of the world
like in a long tunnel of suits and work:
Your clarity fades, dresses, sheds its leaves
and once again it becomes a bare hand.
8. Thirst for you
Thirst for you haunts me on hungry nights.
Trembling red hand that rises to its life.
Drunk with thirst, crazy thirst, thirst for a dry jungle.
Thirst for burning metal, thirst for greedy roots…
That is why you are the thirst and what must quench it.
How can I not love you if I have to love you for that.
If that is the tie, how can we cut it? How?
As if even my bones are thirsty for your bones.
Thirst for you, atrocious and sweet garland .
Thirst for you that bites me like a dog at night.
The eyes are thirsty, what are your eyes for?
The mouth is thirsty, what are your kisses for?
The soul is set on fire by these embers that love you.
The body is a living fire that will burn your body.
Of thirst Infinite thirst. Thirst that seeks your thirst.
And in it it is annihilated like water in fire.
Short love poems to dedicate to your partner
How do you describe the love you feel for your partner in just a few lines? It’s no easy task, but these poems, written by skilled masters of the pen, such as Mario Benedetti , exceed any expectations. Enter this poetic corner, where words become whispers and verses become caresses.
9. Sometimes , by Nicolás Guillén
Sometimes I feel like being cheesy
to say: I love you madly.
Sometimes I feel like being stupid
to shout: I love her so much!
Sometimes I feel like being a child
to cry curled up in her bosom.
Sometimes I feel like I’m dead
to feel,
under the wet earth of my juices,
A flower grows on me
breaking my chest,
a flower and say:
This flower, for you.
10. With You , by Luis Cernuda
My land?
You are my land.
My people?
My people are you.
Exile and death
For me they are where
don’t be you.
And my life?
Tell me, my life,
What is it, if not you?
11. Mouths , by Mario Benedetti
Where does the mouth begin?
in the kiss?
in the insult?
in the bite?
in the scream?
in the yawn?
in the smile?
in the whistle?
in the threat?
in the moan?
Let it be very clear to you
where your mouth ends
that’s where mine begins.
12. We are all one , by Eduardo Galeano
I hope we can have the courage to be alone
and the courage to risk being together.
13. As if every kiss , by Fernando Pessoa
As if every kiss
out of farewell,
My Chloe, let us kiss, loving.
Maybe it’s our turn now
on the shoulder the hand that calls
to the boat that comes only empty;
And that in the same beam
tie what we were mutually
and the alien universal sum of life.
14. I don’t want to die without hearing from you , by Elsa López
I don’t want to die without hearing from you.
I don’t want to die with a perplexed soul
knowing you are different, lost on other beaches.
I don’t want to die with this grief.
through the infinite arch of that sad dome
where your dreams live in the midday sun.
I don’t want to die without having given you
the golden spheres of my body,
the skin that covers me, the trembling that invades me.
I don’t want to die without you having loved me.
15. Two bodies , by Octavio Paz
Two bodies face to face
are sometimes two waves
and the night is ocean.
Two bodies face to face
They are sometimes two stones
and the desert night.
Two bodies face to face
are sometimes roots
linked at night.
Two bodies face to face
They are sometimes knives
and the lightning night.
Two bodies face to face
They are two falling stars
in an empty sky.
16. You have me in your hands , by Jaime Sabines
You have me in your hands
and you read me the same as a book.
You know what I don’t know
and you tell me things I don’t say.
I learn more from you than from myself.
You are like a miracle at all times,
like a pain without a place.
If you weren’t a woman you would be my friend.
Sometimes I want to talk to you about women
that I pursue at your side.
You are like forgiveness
and I am like your son.
What good eyes do you have when you are with me?
How distant you become and how absent
when I sacrifice you to loneliness!
Sweet as your name, as a fig,
you wait for me in your love until I arrive.
You are like my home,
you are like my death, my love.
17. That kiss , by Claribel Alegría
That kiss from yesterday
He opened the door for me
and all the memories
that I believed ghosts
they stood up stubborn
to bite me.
18. Who lights up , by Alejandra Pizarnik
When you look at me
my eyes are keys,
the wall has secrets,
my fear words, poems.
Only you make my memory,
a fascinated traveler,
an incessant fire.
19. Rhyme XCI , by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
The sun may remain cloudy forever;
The sea could dry up in an instant;
The Earth’s axis may break
Like a weak crystal.
Everything will happen! Death will be able to
Cover me with your funereal crepe;
But it will never be extinguished in me
The flame of your love.
20. When you come to love , by Rubén Darío
When you come to love, if you have not loved,
you will know that in this world
It is the greatest and deepest pain
to be both happy and unhappy at the same time.
Corollary: love is an abyss
of light and shadow, poetry and prose,
and where the most expensive thing is done
which is laughing and crying at the same time.
The worst, the most terrible,
is that living without it is impossible.
21. Days and nights I have searched for you , by Vicente Huidobro
Days and nights I have searched for you
Without finding the place where you sing
I have searched for you through time above and down the river
You have lost yourself in the tears
Nights and nights I have searched for you
Without finding the place where you cry
Because I know you’re crying
It’s enough for me to look at myself in a mirror
To know that you are crying and you have cried for me
Only you save the crying
And of dark beggar
You make him king crowned by your hand.
22. Diamond , by Giovanni Quessep
If I could give you
The light that is not seen
In a deep blue
About fish. If I could
Give you an apple
Without the lost Eden,
A sunflower without petals
No compass of light
that he would rise, drunk,
to the evening sky;
and this blank page
that you could read
as the clearest hieroglyph is read.
If I could give you, like
It is sung in beautiful verses,
wings without a bird,
always a flight without wings,
my writing would be,
perhaps like the diamond,
flameless light stone,
perpetual paradise.
23. We get naked , by Fabio Morábito
We get so naked
until losing sex
under the bed,
We get so naked
that the flies swore
that we had died.
I stripped you naked inside,
I unhinged you so deeply
that my orgasm was lost.
We get so naked
that we smelled burning,
that a hundred times the lava
came back to hide us.
24. What will it be like to be you , by Ana Rossetti
What will it be like to be you.
This is the enigma, the overwhelming attraction
to know, the irresistible desire to drop anchor
in you, to possess you.
What will be the perplexity of being you.
What, the mystery, the pain of being you and knowing.
What, the stupor of being you, truly you and,
with your eyes, see me.
What will it be like to feel that I love you.
What will it be like, being you, to hear me say it.
What, then, to feel what you would feel.
25. You get naked , by Jaime Sabines
You undress as if you were alone
and suddenly you discover that you are with me.
How I love you then
between the sheets and the cold!
You start flirting with me like a stranger
and I court you ceremoniously and warmly.
I think I’m your husband
and that you cheat on me with me.
And how we love each other then in laughter
to find ourselves alone in forbidden love!
(Afterwards, when it happened, I’m afraid of you
and I feel a chill).
26. Successive , by Gerardo Diego
Let me caress you slowly,
let me slowly check you,
to see that you are real, to continue you
from yourself to yourself extensively.
Wave after wave radiates from your forehead
and, gently, barely curling,
They break their ten foams when they kiss you
of your feet on the teenage beach.
This is how I love you, fluid and successive,
spring, you of you, furtive water,
music for the lazy touch.
This is how I love you, in small limits,
here and there, fragments, lily, rose,
and your unity afterwards, light of my dreams.
27. Woman water , by Juan Ramón Jiménez
What did you copy into me,
that when it is missing in me
the image of the summit
I run to look at myself in you?
28. I love you for your eyebrows , by Julio Cortázar
I love you for your eyebrows, for your hair, I debate you in corridors
very white where the sources of light play,
I argue with you on every name,
I gently tear off your scar,
I’m putting lightning ashes and ribbons in your hair
who slept in the rain.
I don’t want you to have a form, let it be
precisely what comes behind your hand,
because the water, consider the water, and the lions
When dissolved in the sugar of the fable,
and the gestures, that architecture of nothingness,
lighting their lamps in the middle of the meeting.
Every morning is the blackboard where I invent you and draw you,
ready to erase you, that’s not who you are, nor
with that straight hair, that smile.
I seek your sum, the edge of the glass where the wine
It is also the moon and the mirror,
I look for that line that makes a man tremble in
a museum gallery.
Besides, I love you, and it’s hot and cold.
29. Cover my mouth, love, the roof of my mouth , by Rafael Alberti
Cover my mouth, love, the roof of my mouth
with that extreme foaming rapture,
which is the jasmine of the one who knows and the one who burns,
sprouted on the tip of rock coral.
Give it to me, love, your salt, crazy
So sharp lancinating supreme flower,
Doubling his fury on the diadem
of the biting keys that unbridled it.
Oh tight flow, love, oh beautiful
tempered bubbling of snow
through such a narrow cave in raw flesh,
to see how your fine neck
It slips away, love, and it rains on you
of jasmine and stars of saliva!
30. Blue of you , by Eduardo Carranza
Thinking about you is blue, like wandering
through a golden forest at noon:
Gardens are born in my speech
and with my clouds I walk through your dreams.
A soft air unites us and separates us,
a distance of melancholy;
I raise the arms of my poetry,
blue of you, hurt and waiting.
It’s like a horizon of violins
or a warm suffering of jasmines
thinking of you, of blue temperament.
The world becomes crystal clear to me,
and I look at you, between lamp of trill,
blue Sunday of my thoughts.
31. I love you , by Paul Éluard
I love you for all the women I never met
I love you for all the times I didn’t live
For the smell of the high seas
For the smell of warm bread
For the pure animal that does not fear man
I love you for loving
I love you for all the women I don’t want
Who reflects me but yourself, I see so little of myself
Without you I see nothing but a desert expanse
Between before and today
There were those deaths that I skipped over
I couldn’t get you through the wall of my mirror
I needed to learn from life
Word by word as it is forgotten
I love you for your serenity which is not mine,
For your health
I love you against everything that is just an illusion
For this immortal heart that I do not have
You think you are the doubt, you are only the reason
You are that great sun that goes to my head
When I’m sure of myself.
32. Love , by Claribel Alegria
All those I love
They are in you
and you
in everything I love.
33. In your arms , by Idea Vilariño
In your arms
in my arms
between the soft sheets
between the night
tender
alone
fierce
between the shadow
between the hours
between
a before and after.
Read also The 9 best love quotes by Mario Benedetti
Short love poems to share on social media
Poetry also belongs to social media . These verses are like pills of tenderness and passion, ideal to dedicate to that special person who makes you feel butterflies in your stomach.
34. If man could say what he loves , by Luis Cernuda
If man could say what he loves,
If man could raise his love to heaven
like a cloud in the light;
If like walls that crumble,
to greet the truth standing in the middle,
could collapse his body,
leaving only the truth of his love,
the truth of himself,
which is not called glory, fortune or ambition,
but love or desire,
I would be the one I imagined;
that which is his tongue, his eyes and his hands
proclaims to men the unknown truth,
the truth of their true love.
35. I want to be everything in love , by Claribel Alegría
I want to be everything in love
The lover
the beloved
the vertigo
the breeze
the water that reflects
and that white cloud
vaporous
undecided
that charges us for a moment.
36. If you love me, love me completely , by Dulce María Loynaz
If you love me, love me completely,
not by areas of light or shadow…
If you love me, love me black
and white. And grey, green, and blonde,
and brunette…
Love me day,
love me night…
And early morning at the open window!…
If you love me, don’t cut me off:
Love me all… Or don’t love me at all!
37. I love, you love , by Rubén Darío
Love, love, love, love always, with everything
being and with the earth and the sky,
with the light of the sun and the darkness of the mud;
to love for science and to love for every desire.
And when the mountain of life
may not be hard and long and high and full of abysses,
to love the immensity that is lit by love
and burn in the fusion of our very breasts!
38. Simple Present , by Pedro Salinas
Neither memories nor omens:
just present, singing.
Neither silence nor words:
your voice, only, only, speaking to me.
Neither hands nor lips:
just two bodies,
in the distance, separated.
Neither light nor darkness,
neither eyes nor gaze:
vision, the vision of the soul.
And finally, finally,
neither joy nor pain,
neither heaven nor earth,
neither up nor down,
Neither life nor death, nothing
only love, only loving.
39. Intimacy , by Saramago
In the heart of the most secret mine,
Inside the most distant fruit,
In the vibration of the most discreet note,
In the spiral and resonant conch,
In the thickest layer of paint,
In the vein that the body probes us the most,
In the word that says more softness,
In the root that goes down the most, hides the most,
In the deepest silence of this pause,
Where life became eternity,
I look for your hand and decipher the cause
Of wanting and not believing, end, intimacy.
40. Matter , by José Ángel Valente
Turning the word into matter
where what we would like to say cannot be said
penetrate beyond
of what matter would not say
if to her, like a womb,
delicate we applied ourselves,
naked, white belly,
delicate the ear to hear
the sea, the indistinct
murmur of the sea, beyond you
the unnamed love, always engenders you.
41. Song of Too Much Love , by Vinícius de Moraes
I want to cry because I loved you too much,
I want to die because you gave me life,
Oh, my love, will I never have peace?
Will everything that is in me
It just means longing…
And I don’t even know what will become of me,
Everything tells me that loving will be my end…
What despair love brings,
I who did not know what love was,
Now I know why I’m not happy.
42. Love , by Juan Brossa
Love,
in this poem
there is no time:
the entire course of the Universe
occurs in it at the same time.
43. Absence , by Jorge Luis Borges
I will have to raise the vast life
which is still your mirror:
Every morning I will have to rebuild it.
Since you walked away,
How many places have become vain
and meaningless, equal
to lights in the day.
Afternoons that were the niche of your image,
music in which you always waited for me,
words of that time,
I will have to break them with my hands.
In what hollow will I hide my soul?
so that I don’t see your absence
that like a terrible Sun, without sunset,
shines definitively and ruthlessly?
Your absence surrounds me
like the rope to the throat,
the sea into which it sinks.
Poetry, a portal that reveals the soul
Through these short love poems, you will discover how to express your deepest feelings. In poetry, the soul is stripped bare. It is stripped of all superficial appearances. At the same time, it is revealed with raw honesty and delivered with courage. Have you already selected the poem you would like to dedicate?