The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it is hard to explain it to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I've written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don't start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don't fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it is not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.

I don't know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it's what I think without effort,
With no idea other people are listening to me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn't imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it's not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

I watch the Tagus in such a way
That my watching forgets I'm watching
And suddenly this strikes me
Against my daydreaming --
What is it, river-being flowing?
What is it, my-being-here and watching?

I feel almost nothing suddenly,
Time and place both emptied,
Everything gone hollow suddenly --
Even my being here and thinking.
Everything -- myself, the world around me --
Remains more than external.

In everything the being and remaining, lost,
And vanished from my thinking.
I am powerless to link
Being, idea, soul, by name
To myself, the earth, the heavens . . .

And suddenly face God . . .

It passed beyond Whenness,
Whyness, and Passingness . . .

The whirligig of One Ignored
Who'd not been whirled . . .

Vastness beyond Vastness
Haunting itself without being . . .

The Universe becomes its trail,
God, its shadow . . .

Sky, the blueness of quiet light.
Gentle waveless breaking,
On the lucent length of shore --
Fingertips playing.

They play no melody at all
On the nameless piano shore
From whose rhythmic beat
The day's whole meaning spills.

How fine if this sufficed to please!
How assuring if I believed
This sea, these waves, this sky
Had in them life and being.

Poetry hasn't lost out a bit. Moreover, we now have the machine
With it's own poetry as well, and a totally new way of life,
Businesslike, worldly, intellectual, sentimental,
With which the machine age has endowed our souls.
Voyages are now as beautiful as they ever were,
And a ship will always be beautiful, simply because it's a ship.
A sea voyage is still a sea voyage and distance still exists where it always did --
Nowhere, thank God!

On my shoulders lay His hands, my forehead
Gilded by His glance;
His cause -- this consuming fever to transcend.
And this thirst for grandeur
Throbbing in my soul.

Passing, my uplifted sword's light
Reflects the calmness in my face.
God infused, I fear not what may come,
For come what may, it never
Shall exceed my soul.

Happy the store clerk
With his normal humdrum routine, so light though still a burden,
Having his ordinary life,
For whom pleasure is pleasure, and fear is fear,
Who sleeps out his sleep,
Who dines on his dinner,
Who drinks his drink, and so is content.

I failed in everything.
Since I was up to nothing, maybe it was all really nothing.
From learning and training for anything useful I escaped
By slipping out the back window.
I went off to the country with great plans,
But found only grass and trees there,
And while there were people, they were just like any others.
I leave the window, sit down in a chair. What should I think about?

Today I'm bowled over, as though hit by the truth.
Today I'm clearheaded, as though I were going to die,
Having no more brotherly feelings for things
Than to say good-bye, turning this house and this side of the street
Into a line of coaches in a long train with its whistle shrieking goodbye
From inside my head,
And a nerve-wracking, bone-cracking jerk as it moves off.

Today I'm mixed up, like someone who thought something and grasped it, then lost it.
Today I'm torn between the allegiance I owe
Something real outside me -- the Tobacco Shop across the street,
And something real inside me -- the feeling that it's all a dream.

All beginning's involuntary.
God's the agent.
The hero observes himself,
Multiple and unaware.

Your gaze drops
To the sword found in your hands.
What shall I do with this sword?"

You raised it. And it was done.

Responding to my subconscious motions at the wheel,
The car I borrowed moves like a greyhound with me and under me.
I smile as I think of the symbol, turning to the right.
So many borrowed things I go along with in this world!
So many borrowed things I drive on with as if they were mine!
What's been lent me, alas, is what I myself am!

Cat, you tumble down the street
As if it were your bed.
I think such luck is a treat,
Like feeding without being fed.

You're just a pawn in the hands
Of fate, as stones are, and people!
You follow your instinct and glands;
What you feel you feel -- it's simple.

Because you are like that you are happy;
You're all the nothing you see.
I look at myself -- it's not me.
I know myself -- I'm not I.

These lines I write -- with so much talent
It's unbelievable I hardly feel I've got any!
The fact is this life is a country place
Where a sensitive soul gets easily bored.

The English are made to exist.
There's no other people endowed with
Such tranquility. You throw them a penny
And one of them turns out a smile.

I belong to a type of Portuguese
Who since discovering India
Has been unemployed. Death's a certainty.
I've thought about this a great deal.

There are sicknesses worse than sicknesses,
There are pains that do not ache, not even in the soul,
Yet are more painful than all the others.
There are anxieties dreamed of more real
Than those life brings us, sensations
Felt only by imagining them,
More our own than life itself.
So many things exist without existing,
Exist, and linger on and on,
And on and on belong to us, and are us . . .
Over the turbid green of the wide spreading river
The white circumflexes of the gulls . . .
Over and over the soul, the useless fluttering
Of what never was, nor ever can be, and that's all.

Let me have more wine, life is nothing.

In my dark moments
When there's nobody inside me
And everything's a fog and walls
Of all life offers and possesses ---

If, for a moment, I raise my forehead
From where I am bogged down in myself
And see the far horizon
Full of the setting or floating sun,

I come alive again, I exist, aware,
And even if it's all illusion
The exterior where I forget myself,
There's nothing more I wish or ask for.
I surrender my heart to it.

From my idea of the world
I fell . . .
Void beyond depthlessness . . .
With no I-ness or Thereness . . .

Void without selfness, chaos
Of being thought of as a being . . .
Absolute's rungless ladder . . .
Vision that won't be seen . . .

Beyond God! Beyond God! Black calmness . . .
Lightening flash of Unknownness . . .
O my soul, everything has other meanings,
Even its meaningfulness . . .

Do you dread the unknown, like Hamlet?
But what's not unknown? What is it you know
That lets you call this or that, in particular, unknown?

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don't want the present, I want reality;
I want existent things, not the time which measures things.

What is the present?
It's something relative to the past and the future.
It's something that exists by virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without time present.

I don't want to include time in my scheme.
I don't want to think of things as time bound; I want to think of them as things.
I don't want to separate them from themselves, treating them as things present.

I shouldn't even treat them as real things.
I shouldn't treat them as anything.
I should see them, just see them;
See them until I can't think about them,
See them without time or space,
See, and be able to put aside all but the seeable,
This is the science of perception, which is no science at all.

God wills, Man dreams, the work is born.
God willed that all earth be one,
That seas unite and never separate.
You he blessed, and you went forth to read the foam.

And the white shore lit up, isle to continent,
And flowed, even to the world's end,
And suddenly the earth was seen complete,
Upsurging, round, from blue profundity.

Who blessed you made you Portuguese.
Us he gave a sign: the sea's and our part in you.
The Sea fulfilled, the Empire fell apart.
But ah, Portugal must yet fulfill itself!

I'm so full of feeling
I can easily believe
I must be sentimental.
But when I mull this over,
I see it's all in thought,
I felt nothing whatever.

I come from around Beja.
I'm going to the center of Lisbon.
I'm not bringing anything and won't find a thing.
I feel the exhaustion I anticipate from what I won't find.
And my yearning comes not from the past or the future.
In this book I have inscribed the image of my dead design:
I was, like the grasses, and never uprooted.

Poetry is grand, and goodness too, and dancing...
But best of all are children,
Flowers, music, moonlight, and the sun
That sins only when aborting and not bearing.

And more than all of this
Is Jesus Christ,
Who knew nothing of finances
Nor claimed he had a library...

Wait! On desert sands I fell, in that hard hour
God reserves for His own
As the interval when the soul may bathe
In dreams that are God.

What matter desert, death, misfortune,
If I am in God's keeping?
As He I've dreamt myself to last forever.
And as He I shall return.