Accepting that love ends is one of the saddest things that exist. It can end for many reasons: a disappointment, a betrayal, a misunderstanding or, worst of all, simply because time passed and the relationship lost its magic.
Thinking of a heartbreak poem may seem sad. But on the contrary: talking to that love that has gone, or that has ended, will help you put everything you feel into words. In general, the first step to healing is to accept.
Some will make you feel worse in the moment, but they will teach you a great lesson. Others, on the other hand, will comfort you so that you can move on, telling you that all is not lost, that there is life after this little death.
As always, the words are there to accompany you and to help you heal. That is why we have chosen these heartbreak poems for you to read and not feel so lonely.
1. Jaime Sabines – I hope to be cured of you
I hope to heal from you in a few days. I must stop smoking you, drinking you, thinking about you. It’s possible. Following the requirements of the moral in turn. I prescribe time, abstinence, solitude.
Do you think it’s okay that I love you for just a week? It’s not much, it’s not little, it’s enough. In one week all the words of love that have ever been spoken on earth can be gathered together and set on fire. I’m going to warm you with that bonfire of burned love. And also the silence. Because the best words of love are between two people who say nothing to each other.
It is also necessary to burn that other lateral and subversive language of the one who loves. (You know how I tell you that I love you when I say: «how hot it is», «give me water», «do you know how to drive?», «it got dark»… Among the people, next to your people and mine, I told you “it’s late”, and you knew I said “I love you”).
One more week to gather all the love of time. To give it to you. So you can do with it what you want: save it, caress it, throw it away. It doesn’t work, it’s true. I just want a week to figure things out. Because this is very similar to leaving a madhouse to enter a pantheon.
2. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz – Of love, previously placed in an unworthy subject, it is emblazoned with repentance
When my error and your vileness I see,
I contemplate, Silvio, of my mistaken love,
how serious is the malice of sin,
how violent the force of a desire. To my own memory I hardly believe
that could fit in my care
the last line of the despised,
the final term of a bad job. I would very much like, when I get to see you,
seeing my infamous love to be able to deny it;
but then just reason warns me that the only remedy is to publish it;
because of the great crime of loving you
it’s just sad enough to admit it.
3. Nahui Olin – Four hundred and twelve moons without you
The last time I saw you, you carried two heavy red rocks on your shoulders, your chest was no longer multicolored, and in your hands hung seventy-five lies that I invented, that I said you promulgated with the intention of staying a little while longer.
The last time I saw you, that I really saw you, and you were the one I loved, you arrived late and in a hurry; embarrassed you walked on the grass, incredulous of your luck.
The last time I saw you you were no longer flying, but you walked with a foreign air. You asked me who I was and my answer did not correspond to the woman you loved.
It doesn’t matter anymore, after that time I saw you so many more, but not the same anymore, not like someone who finds an oasis in the desert.
I saw you deserted, uninhabited and lost.
No, after that last time I haven’t seen you again.
4. Rupi Kaur – You thought I was a city
Did you think I was a city
Big enough to run away for the weekend?
I am the town that surrounds her
the one you’ve never heard of
but for which you always travel
there are no neon lights here
neither skyscrapers nor statues
but there is thunder
that makes the bridges tremble
I’m not street meat I’m homemade jelly
thick enough to cut the sweetest thing your lips have ever touched
I’m not police sirens I’m a crackling chimney
I could set you on fire and you couldn’t tear your eyes out of me
because I would look so beautiful that you would blush
I am not a hotel room I am a home
I’m not the whiskey you want
but the water you need
don’t come with expectations
don’t try to vacation on me.
5. Josefa Parra – Things we won’t have
Things we won’t have:
April mornings long with love and sleep.
November afternoons with endless rain.
The stubbornly starry summer nights.
Every sweet autumn morning.
Things I have missed:
I will not know the taste of your sleeping mouth.
I will not cradle your children. I will not drink your wine.
I will not cry with you watching any sunset.
Your belly will not dawn on me between the sheets.
I have a whole treasure of gaps and absences,
a complete sampler of blank pages.
6. Pablo Neruda – Poem XX
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
Write, for example: “The night is starry,
and the stars shiver, blue, in the distance”.
The night wind turns in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
She loved me, sometimes I also loved her.
How not to have loved her great still eyes.
I can write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I do not have her. Feeling I’ve lost her.
Hear the inmense night, even more without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to grass.
Does it matter that my love could not keep it.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.
That is all. In the distance someone sings. In the distance.
My soul is not content with having lost it.
As if to bring her closer, my gaze searches for her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night that does whiten the same
trees.
We, the ones then, are not the same.
I don’t love her anymore, it’s true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
Of other. Will be from another. As before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. The infinite eyes of him.
I don’t love her anymore, it’s true, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, and oblivion is so long.
Because on nights like this I had her among my
arms,
My soul is not content with having lost it.
Although this is the last pain that she causes me,
and these are the last verses that I write to him.
7. Gabriela Mistral – Absence
My body leaves you drop by drop.
My face is gone in a dull oil painting;
my hands go in loose quicksilver;
my feet leave in two times of dust.
Everything is gone, everything is gone!
My voice goes away, that made you bell
closed to what is not us.
My gestures that unraveled are gone,
in shuttles, under your eyes.
And the look that gives you goes away,
when he looks at you, the juniper and the elm.
I leave you with your same breaths:
as moisture from your body evaporate.
I leave you awake and asleep,
and in your most faithful memory I already erase myself.
And in your memory I become like those
who were not born in plains or groves.
Blood would be and I was in the palms
of your work, and in your mouth of must.
Your entrails were, and would be burned
in marches of yours that I never hear again,
and in your passion that echoes in the night
like madness of seas alone!
Everything is gone, everything is gone!
8. Julio Cortázar – The slow heartbreak machine
The slow heartbreak machine
The slow heartbreak machine
ebb gears,
the bodies that leave the pillows,
the sheets, the kisses,
and standing before the mirror wondering
each to himself,
no longer looking at each other,
no longer naked for the other,
I do not love you anymore,
my love.
9. Alejandra Pizarnik – The Lover
this gloomy mania for living
this recondite mood of living
alejandra drags you, don’t deny it
today you looked in the mirror
and it was sad you were alone
the light roared the air sang
but your loved one did not return
you will send messages you will smile
you will shake your hands so it will come back
your loved so loved
you hear the insane siren that stole it
the ship with beards of foam
where the laughter died
Do you remember the last hug?
oh no worries
laugh in the handkerchief cry out loud
but close the doors of your face
so they don’t say later
That woman in love was you
you regret the days
the nights blame you
life hurts so much
desperate where are you going?
desperate nothing more
10. Mario Benedetti – Breastplate Heart
Because I have you and not
because I think of you
because the night is open-eyed
because the night passes and I say love
because you have come to collect your image
and you are better than all your images
because you are beautiful from the foot to the soul
because you are good from the soul to me
because you hide sweet in pride
small and sweet
breastplate heart
because you are mine
because you are not mine
because I look at you and die
and worse than death
if I don’t look at you love
if I don’t look at you
because you always exist everywhere
but you exist better where I love you
because your mouth is blood
and you’re cold
I have to love you love
I have to love you
Although this wound hurts like two
Even if I look for you and don’t find you
and although
the night passes and I have you
and no.
11. Jorge Luis Borges – Absence
I shall raise the vast life
that even now is your mirror:
Every morning I will have to rebuild it.
Since you walked away
how many places have become vain
and meaningless, the same
to lights in the day.
Afternoons that were a 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 you don’t see your absence
that like a terrible sun, without sunset,
shines final and ruthless?
your absence surrounds me
like the rope to the throat,
the sea into which it sinks.
12. Gustavo Alejandro Castiñeiras – Poem of a Memory
tell me please where you are not
where can I not be your absence
where can I live without remembering you,
and where to remember, without it hurting.
Tell me please in what emptiness,
your shadow is not filling the centers;
where my solitude is itself,
and not the feeling that you are far away.
Please tell me which way
I will be able to walk, without being your footprint;
where I can run not to look for you,
and where to rest from my sadness.
Tell me please what is the night,
that does not have the color of your gaze;
which is the sun, that has light only,
and not the feeling that you call me.
Please tell me where there is a sea,
Don’t whisper your words in my ears.
Tell me please in which corner,
nobody will be able to see my sadness;
tell me what is the hollow of my pillow,
that does not have your head supported.
Tell me please what is the night,
in which you will come, to watch over your dream;
that I can’t live, because I miss you;
and that I can’t die, because I love you.
13. Elizabeth Bishop – An Art
It is not difficult to master the art of losing:
so many things seem full of purpose to be lost,
that his loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept being stunned by the loss
of the keys to the door, of the wasted hour.
It is not difficult to master the art of losing.
Then practice losing further and faster:
the places, and the names, and where you intended
to travel. None of this will bring you any disaster.
I have lost my mother’s watch. And, look! I’m going for the last
—perhaps for the penultimate— of three beloved houses.
It is not difficult to master the art of losing.
I have lost two cities, both precious. And, vaster,
I owned some kingdoms, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
Even having lost you (your voice joking, a gesture
that I love) I will not have lied. Of course,
it is not difficult to master the art of losing, even though sometimes
It may seem like (write it down!) a disaster.