Next to the rustle of the cereal, among the waves of the wind on the oats, the olive tree with its silver volume, an austere lineage, in its twisted earthly heart: the frail olive trees polished by the fingers that made the dove and the sea snail: green, innumerable, pure petioles of nature, and there in the sunny olive groves, where only blue sky with cicadas and hard earth exist, there the prodigy, the perfect capsule of the olive that fills the foliage with its constellations: later the containers, the miracle, the ‘oil.
(From Pablo Neruda, Ode to wine and other elementary odes, Passigli, 2002)
