Poems of Fernando Pessoa

2012-01-26T17:38:00.000-08:00

I feel sorry for the stars
Which have shined for so long,
So long, so long . . .
I feel sorry for the stars.

Is there not a weariness
Felt by things,
By all things,
Such as we feel in our limbs?

A weariness of existing,
Of being,
Just of being,
Whether sad or happy . . .

Is there not, finally,
For all things that are,
Not just death
But some other finality?
Or a higher purpose,
Some kind of pardon?

2012-01-18T18:27:00.000-08:00

From the mountain comes a song
Saying that however much
The soul may come to have,
It will always be unhappy.

The world is not its home,
And all that the world gives it
Is given as if to someone
Who'd rather not receive.

Is that what it says? I don't know.
There's music, no voice, at the window
Where I ponder my self, alone,
Like a shining star its glow.

2012-01-14T09:54:00.000-08:00

On day in a restaurant, outside of space and time,
I was served up love as a dish of cold tripe.
I politely told the missionary of the kitchen
That I preferred it hot,
Because tripe (and it was Oporto-style) is never eaten cold.

They got impatient with me.
You can never be right, even in a restaurant.
I didn't eat it, I ordered nothing else, I paid the bill,
And I decided to take a walk down the street.

Who knows what this might mean?
I don't know, and it happened to me . . .

(I know very well that in everyone's childhood there was a garden,
Private or public, or belonging to the neighbor.
I know very well that our playing was the owner of it
And that sadness belongs to today.)

I know this many times over
But if I asked for love, why did they bring me
Oporto-style tripe that was cold?
It is not a dish that can be eaten cold,
But they served it to me cold.
I didn't make a fuss, but it was cold.
It can never be eaten cold, but it came cold.

2012-01-08T06:55:00.001-08:00

To obtain everything by divine sufficiency --
Holiday eves, permissions, useful tips,
Life's beautiful things --
Talent, virtue, impunity,
The inclination to see others home,
The status of traveler,
The convenience of boarding early so as to get a seat,
And something's always missing, a glass, a breeze, a phrase,
And the more one invents and enjoys, the more life hurts.

2012-01-01T16:02:00.000-08:00

It was on one of my voyages . . .
High sea, and the moon was out . . .
The evening hubbub aboard ship had quieted.
One by one, group by group, the passengers retired.
The band was just furniture that for some reason had remained in a corner.
Only in the smoking lounge did a chess game silently continue.
Life droned through the open door of the engine room.
Alone . . . A naked soul face-to-face with the universe!
(O town of my birth in faraway Portugal!
Why didn't I die as a child, when all I knew was you?)

2011-10-23T18:21:00.000-07:00

I was never one who in love or in friendship
Preferred one sex over the other. Beauty
Attracts me in equal measure, wherever
I find it, in season.

The bird alights, looking only to its alighting,
Its desire to alight mattering more than the branch.
The river runs where it finds its repose,
And not where it is needed.

Thus I separate myself from distinctions
Of where and how I love or don't love,
And I don't offend the inherent innocence
Of when people love.

Love is not in the object but in the act.
I only love something when I start loving it.
My love does not reside in it
But in my love.

The gods who gave us this path of love
To which we have given the name beauty
Did not place it only in women
Or only in fruit.

They also gave us the flower to pluck.
And perhaps we pluck with better love
What we seek for the using.

2011-08-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

Listen, Daisy, When I die, although
You may not feel a thing, you must
Tell all my friends in London how much
My loss makes you suffer. Then go

To York, where you claim you were born
(But I don't believe a thing you claim),
To tell that poor boy who gave me
So many hours of joy (but of course

You don't know about that) that I'm dead.
Even he, whom I thought I sincerely
Loved, won't care. . . Then go and break

The news to that strange girl Cecily,
Who believed that one day I'd be great. . .
To hell with life and everyone in it!

2011-07-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know how to be truly sad
Or how to be really happy.
No, I don't know how to be.
Might sincere souls be
Like me, without knowing it?

Before the lie of emotion
And the fiction of the soul,
I cherish the calm it gives me
To see flowers without reason
Flower without a heart.

But finally there is no difference.
As flowers flower without wanting to,
Without wanting to, people think.
What in flowers is florescence
In us is consciousness.

Later, for us as for them,
When Destiny decides it is time,
The feet of the gods will come
And trample all of us under.

Fine, but until they come
Let us still flower or think.

2011-06-21T17:18:00.000-07:00

You who are a mystic see a meaning in all things.
For you everything has a veiled significance.
There is something hidden in each thing you see.
What you see you always see to see something else.

I, who has eyes that are only for seeing,
See an absence of meaning in all things.
And seeing this, I love myself, since to be a thing is to mean nothing.
To be a thing is to be subject to no interpretation.

2011-05-24T04:49:00.000-07:00

I WALK on, nothing touches me: I'm foreign.
The women who scurry to their front doors
See only that I have walked by.
I'm always around the corner from whoever tries to see me,
Invulnerable to metals and encrustations.

O afternoon, what memories!
Just yesterday I was a child leaning over the well,
Delighted to see my face in the water down below.
Today, a man, I see my face in the deep water of the world.
And if I laugh it's only because I was once a different I:
A child delighted to see his face in the bottom of the well.

I feel them all as flesh of my own flesh.
I touch my arm and there they are:
The dead, who never leave me!
And the dead are all the people, places, and days from my past.
Sometimes amid the noise of the factory machines
A nostalgia lightly grazes my arm,
I turn around, and there in the sunlit yard of my old house
Stands the child I was, happily ignorant of what I would become.

Ah, be motherly!
Ah, be mellifluous and speechless,
O night in which I forget myself
Remembering . . .

2011-05-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

To see the fields and the river
It isn't enough to open the window.
To see the trees and the flowers
It isn't enough not to be blind.
It is also necessary to have no philosophy.
With philosophy there are no trees, just ideas.
There is only each one of us, like a cave.
There is only a shut window, and a whole world outside,
And a dream of what could be seen if the window were opened,
Which is never what is seen when the window is opened.

2011-04-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

The labor is great and man is small.
I, Diogo Cao, a navigator,
Left this pillar by the swarthy strand
And sailed onward.

The soul is divine and the work imperfect.
This pillar is a sign to the wind and the skies
That I've done my part in this venture:
The rest only God can do.

And the five shields of this coat of arms
Teach the immense and possible occean
That the sea with limits is for Greece or Rome:
The limitless sea is Portuguese.

And the cross on high says that what's in my soul
And gives me this fever to navigate
Will only find in God's eternal calm
The forever sought-after port.

2011-03-03T04:54:00.000-08:00

Back when they used to celebrate my birthday

I was happy and no one was dead.

In the old house even my birthday was centuries-old tradition,

And everyone's joy, mine included, was as sure as any religion.

Back when they used to celebrate my birthday

I enjoyed the good health of understanding nothing,

Of being intelligent in my family's eyes,

And of not having the hopes that others had for me.

When I began to have hope, I no longer knew how to hope.

When I began to look at life, it had lost all its meaning for me.

Yes, that person I knew as me,

That person with a heart and family,

That person of quasi-rural evenings all spent together,

That person who was a boy they loved,

That person - my God! - whom only today I realize I was . . .

How faraway! . . .

(Not even an echo . . .)

When they used to celebrate my birthday!

The person I am today is like the damp in the wall at the back of the house

That makes the walls mildew . . .

What I am today (and the house of those who loved me trembles through my tears) --

What I am today is their having sold the house,

It's all of them having died,

It's I having survived myself like a spent match.

2011-02-19T06:25:00.000-08:00

I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I'd met.
We'd been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train we call life
We are all chance events in one another's lives
And we all feel sorry when it is time to get off.

All that is human moves me, because I am a man.
All that is human moves me, not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrines
But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself.

The maid who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she'd been mistreated . . .

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world's sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart.

And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

2011-01-30T16:36:00.000-08:00

I lie down in the grass
And forget all I was taught.
What I was taught never made me any warmer or cooler.
What I was told exists never changed the shape of a thing.
What I was made to see never touched my eyes.
What was pointed out to me was never there: only what was there was there.

2011-01-12T19:15:00.001-08:00

I walk in the night of the suburban street,
Returning from the conference of experts like myself.
I return alone, now a poet, without expertise or engineering,
Human unto the sound of my solitary shoes in the beginning of the night.
In the distance the last shutters are pulled down into the last shop.
Ah, the sound of suppertime in happy homes!
I walk, and my ears peer into the homes.
My inherent exile comes alive in the darkness
Of the street which is my home, my being, and my blood.
To be a child from a well-off family,
With a nursemaid, a soft bed, and a child's slumber!
O my unprivileged heart!
My feeling of exclusion!
My bitter grief for being I!

Who made firewood out of my childhood crib?
Who made rags from the sheets I slept in as a boy?
Who tossed the lace from the shirt I wore when baptized
Into the house dust and fruit skins
Of the world's garbage cans?
Who sold me to fate?
Who exchanged me for what I am?

I've just spoken with precision in definite circumstances.
I made concrete points, like an adding machine.
I was accurate like a scale.
I told what I knew.

2011-01-02T07:50:00.000-08:00

The gods grant nothing more than this life,
So let us reject whatever lifts us
To unbreathable heights,
Eternal but flowerless.
Let our only science be to accept,
And as long as the blood in our veins still pulses
And love does not shrivel,
Let us go on
Like panes of glass: transparent to light,
Pattered by the sad rain trickling down,
Warmed by the sun,
And reflecting a little.

2010-12-26T11:05:00.001-08:00

I devote my higher mind to the ardent
Pursuit of the summit, leaving
Verse to chance and its laws,
For when the thought is lofty and noble,
The sentence will naturally seek it,
And rhythm slavishly serve it.

2010-11-20T21:20:00.000-08:00

I was left in the world, all alone,
By the Gods who ordain.
It's futile to fight them: what they have given
I accept without question,
Like wheat that blows in the wind, raising
It's head when the wind stops blowing.

2010-11-06T09:20:00.000-07:00

This great wavering between
Believing and not quite dis-
Believing troubles the heart
Weary of knowing nothing.

Estranged from what it knows
For not knowing what it is,
The heart only has one vital
Moment, the finding of faith --

The faith that all the stars
Know, for it is the spider
Whose web they weave, and it is
The life before everything.

2010-10-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

I leaned back in the deck chair and closed my eyes,
And my destiny loomed like a cliff in my soul.
My past life mingled with that of the of the future,
And at some point a noise reached my ears
From the smoking lounge: the chess game must have ended.

Ah, tossed
In the feeling of the waves,
Rocked
In the comforting idea that today is still not tomorrow,
That at least right now I have no responsibilities,
That I don't have a personality as such but just feel myself here,
On this chair, like a book left by the Swedish lady . . .

Ah, sunken
In the torpor of the imagination, no doubt a bit sleepy,
Peacefully restless,
Suddenly analogous to the child I once was,
When I played at the house in the country and didn't know basic algebra,
Let alone the algebra with x's and y's of the emotions . . .

Ah, all of me yearns
For that moment of no importance
In my life.
All of me yearns for that as for other analogous moments--
Those in which I had no importance at all,
Those in which I grasped, without the mind, the complete emptiness of existence,
And there was moonlight and sea and solitude, O Alvaro.

2010-09-11T11:09:00.000-07:00

If I think for more than a moment
Of my life that is passing by,
I am - to my thinking mind -
A cadaver waiting to die.

In a little while (the longest life
Amounts to a few short years),
I, with all I have had or missed,
With my delusions and my fears,

Will cease to have visible form
Here where the sun shines down,
And - dispersed and insensible,
Or else drunk with another dawn -

I suppose I will have lost
The warm and human contact
With the passing months and years,
With earth and the dreams it contains.

The sun may gild the face
Of the days, but soundless space
Reminds us it is just a facade:
In the night all things are erased.

2010-08-07T09:51:00.000-07:00

On the eve of never departing
At least there are no suitcases to pack
Or lists to draw up with things to do
(Some of which are always forgotten)
The following day, before leaving.

Nothing needs to be done
On the eve of never departing.

How relaxing not to have anything at all
To be relaxed about!
What peace of mind when there is no more reason to shrug.
Tedium (poor tedium!) having been left behind
To arrive deliberately at nothing!
What happiness it is not to need to be happy,
Like an opportunity turned inside out.

For some months now I've been living
The vegetative life of thought,
Day after day sine linea . . .

Yes, how relaxing . . .
Peace of mind . . .
What a relief after so many journeys -- physical and mental --
To be able to look at closed suitcases as at nothing!
Doze off, soul, doze off!
Doze while you can!
Doze!

You don't have much time! Doze,
For it's the eve of never departing!

2010-07-24T05:18:00.001-07:00

I don't know how many souls I have.
I've changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I've never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey--
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can't feel myself.

That's why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: "Was that me?"
God knows, because he wrote it.

2010-07-13T12:35:00.001-07:00

I'd rather be the dust of the road
And trampled on by the feet of the poor . . .

I'd rather be the rivers that flow
And have washerwomen along my shore . . .

I'd rather be the poplars next to the river
With only sky above and water below . . .

I'd rather be the miller's donkey
And have him beat me and care for me . . .

Rather this than go through life
Always looking back and feeling regret . . .

2010-06-16T07:41:00.000-07:00

TO FEEL everything in every way,
To hold all opinions,
To be sincere contradicting oneself every minute,
To annoy oneself with absolute open-mindedness,
And to love things just like God.

2010-06-05T05:31:00.000-07:00

By the moonlight, in the distance,
A sailboat on the river
Sails peacefully by.
What does it reveal?

I don't know, but my being
Feels suddenly strange,
And I dream without seeing
The dreams that I have.

What anguish engulfs me?
What love can't I explain?
It's the sailboat that passes
In the night that remains.

2010-06-02T14:42:00.000-07:00

Follow your destiny,
Water your plants,
Love your roses.
The rest is shadow
Of unknown trees.

Reality is always
More or less
Than what we want.
Only we are always
Equal to ourselves.

It's good to live alone,
And noble and great
Always to live simply.
Leave pain on the altar
As an offering to the gods.

See life from a distance.
Never question it.
There's nothing it can
Tell you. The answer
Lies beyond the Gods.

But quietly imitate
Olympus in your heart.
The gods are gods
Because they don't think
About what they are.

2010-05-22T16:19:00.000-07:00

I don't know if the stars rule the world
Or if tarot or playing cards
Can reveal anything.
I don't know if the rolling of dice
Can lead to any conclusion.
But I also don't know
If anything is attained
By living the way most people do.

Yes, I don't know
If I should believe in this daily rising sun
Whose authenticity no one can guarantee me,
Or if it would be better (because better or more convenient)
To believe in some other sun,
One that shines even at night,
Some profound incandescence of things,
Surpassing my understanding.

For now. . .
(Let's take it slow)
For now
I have an absolutely secure grip on the stair rail,
I secure it with my hand--
This rail that doesn't belong to me
And that I lean on as I ascend. . .
Yes. . . I ascend. . .
I ascend to this:
I don't know if the stars rule the world.

2010-05-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

"Hello, keeper of sheep
There on the side of the road.
What does the blowing wind say to you?"

"That it's wind and that it blows,
And that it has blown before,
And that it will blow hereafter.
And what does it say to you?"

"Much more than that.
It speaks to me of many other things:
Of memories and nostalgias,
And of things that never were."

"You've never heard the wind blow.
The wind only speaks of the wind.
What you heard was a lie,
And the lie is in you."

2010-05-03T12:11:00.001-07:00

Fate frightens me, Lydia. Nothing is certain.
At any moment something could happen
To change all that we are.
When we leave what is known, the very step
We take is strange. Grave numens guard
The customary boundaries.
We are not gods: blind, we fear,
And prefer the meager life we know
To novelty, the abyss.

2010-04-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

I CARRY inside my heart,
As in a chest too full to shut,
All the places where I have been,
All the ports at which I have called,
All the sights I've seen through windows and portholes
And from quarterdecks, dreaming.
And all of this, which is so much, is nothing next to what I want.

2010-04-10T14:35:00.000-07:00

I can also make conjectures.
There is in each thing an animating essence.
In plants it's a tiny nymph that exists on the outside.
In animals it's a remote inner being.
In man it's the soul that lives with him and is him.
In the gods it has the same size
And fills the same space as the body
And is the same thing as the body.
For this reason it is said that gods never die.
For this reason the gods do not have body and soul
But just body, and they are perfect.
The body is their soul,
And they have consciousness in their divine flesh.

2010-04-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

Today, feeling bored and uninspired,
Today, apathetic, short on desire,
I will write my epitaph: "Here lies Alvaro..."
(The Greek anthology has more apropos.)
What's the reason for these several rhymes?
No reason. A friend I see from time to time
Wanted to know what I'm doing these days,
And I write these verses to have something to say.
I rarely rhyme, and rhymes rarely succeed,
But sometimes to rhyme is an imperative need.
My heart goes pop like a paper sack
Filled with air and given a good smack,
And the startled stranger turns in confusion,
And I end this poem without a conclusion.

2010-03-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

This morning I went out very early,
Because I woke up even earlier
And had nothing I wanted to do.

I didn't know which way to go,
But the wind blew hard toward one side,
And I followed in the way it pushed me.

So has my life always been, and so I would like it to always be--
I go where the wind takes me and don't need to think.

2010-03-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

All love letters are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn't be love letters if they weren't
Ridiculous.

In my time I also wrote love letters
Equally, inevitably
Ridiculous.

Love letters, if there's love,
Must be
Ridiculous.

But in fact
Only those who've never written
Love letters
Are
Ridiculous.

If only I could go back
To when I wrote love letters
Without thinking how
Ridiculous.

The truth is that today
My memories
Of those love letters
Are what is
Ridiculous.

(All more-than-three-syllable words,
Along with unaccountable feelings,
Are naturally
Ridiculous.)

2010-02-21T12:38:00.000-08:00

The shepherd in love lost his staff,
And the sheep scattered over the slope.
And so lost was he in thought that he didn't even play his flute.
No one came or went. He never found his staff.
Other men, cursing him, rounded up the sheep.
He had not, after all, been loved.
When he stood up from the slope and the false truth, he saw everything;
The wide valleys full of the same shades of green as always,
The tall mountains in the distance, more real than any feeling,
All of reality, with the sky and air and fields that exist,
And he felt the air reopen, with pain, a freedom in his chest.

2010-02-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

The clouds are dark
But toward the south
A scrap of sky
Is sadly blue.

So too in the mind,
Which has no answer,
A scrap remembers
That the heart exists.

This scrap is what
We know as the truth
Of eternal beauty
Beyond what is.

2010-01-28T06:38:00.000-08:00

Countless lives inhabit us.
I don't know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I's than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.

2009-10-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

The gods grant us this one
Liberty: to submit ourselves
To their dominion by an act of will.
It is better that we do this
Since only in its illusion
Does freedom find existence.

The gods, on whom fate eternal
Weighs, do not act otherwise
In their calm and ancient
Self-possessed conviction
That their life's divine and free.

Imitating gods, we, as little
Free as they up on Olympus,
Like those who on the sands
Build castles for the eye's delight --
Let us build our life so that
The gods will know how to thank us
For being their co-equals.

2009-10-12T12:16:00.000-07:00

I go indoors, and shut the window.
They bring the lamp and say good night.
And my voice, content, says good night.
Oh, that my life were like this always:
The day full of sun, or gentle with rain,
Or a fury raging as if the World would end,
A soft afternoon with clusters of people going by,
Looked at with interest from the window,
The last friendly gaze turned to the repose of the trees,
And then, the window closed, the lamp lit,
Without reading a word, without thinking a thought or sleeping,
Feeling life flow through me like a river in its bed,
And there, outside, a vast silence like a god asleep.

2009-09-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

This is all the story of Solomon Waste.
Always hurrying yet never in haste
He fussed and worked and toiled all frothing
And at the end of all did nothing.
This is all the story of Solomon Waste.

He lived in wishing and in striving,
And nothing came of all his living;
He worked and toiled in pain and sweat,
And nothing came out of all that.

And things begun and never ended,
And much undone and much intended,
And all things wrong yet never mended:
This is all the story of Solomon Waste.

Each day new projects did betray,
Yet each day was like every day.
He was born and died and between these
He worried himself to tease.
He bustled, worried, moved and cried
But in his life no more is descried
Than two clear facts: he lived and died.
This is all the story of Solomon Waste.

2009-09-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

Voyages and voyagers -- and so many different types of them!
So many nationalities on earth, so many professions, so many people!
So many different directions to steer one's life,
And life itself, in the end and at heart, always always the same!
So many strange faces! All faces are strange
And nothing gives one the sense of what's holy so much as watching other people constantly.
Brotherhood isn't finally a revolutionary idea,
It's something you learn by living your life, when you've got to tolerate everything.
And you begin finding amusing what you've got to tolerate,
And you end up nearly weeping with tenderness over the things you tolerated!

Ah, and all this is beautiful, all this is human and firmly tied
To the feelings -- so human, so sociable, so bourgeois,
So complexly simple, so metaphysically sad!
Drifting, diverse, life ends by teaching us to be human.
Poor people! poor people, all of us, everywhere!

2009-09-06T07:47:00.000-07:00

One way or another,
The moment permitting,
Able to say what I think at times,
And otherwise saying it poorly and jumbled,
I keep writing my poems without wanting to,
As if writing weren't something made up of gestures,
As if writing were something that happened to me
Like the sun outside shining on me.

I try saying what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try fitting words to the idea
Without going down a corridor
Of thought to find words.

I don't always succeed in feeling what I know I should feel.
My thought swims the river only quite slowly,
Heavily burdened by clothes men have made it wear.
I try divesting myself of what I have learned,
I try forgetting the mode of remembering they taught me,
And scrap off the ink they used to paint my senses,
Unpacking my true emotions,
Unwrapping myself, and being myself, not Alberto Caeiro,
Being a human animal that nature produced.

So I write, wanting to feel nature, not even like a man,
But one who feels nature, nothing more.
So I write, often well, often not,
Now hitting the nail on the head, and now not,
Falling down here, picking myself up there,
Yet always going ahead on my own like a pigheaded blind man.

2009-08-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

Rather the flight of the bird passing and leaving no trace
Than creatures passing, leaving tracks on the ground.
The bird goes by and forgets, which is as it should be.
The creature, no longer there, and so, perfectly useless,
Shows it was there -- also perfectly useless.

Remembering betrays Nature,
Because yesterday's Nature is not Nature,
What's past is nothing and remembering is not seeing.

Fly, bird, fly away; teach me to disappear!

2009-08-08T07:36:00.000-07:00

No one, in the vast and virgin jungle
Of this unreckoned world, ever sees
The God he knows.
Only what is borne upon the wind, upon the wind is heard.
All we ponder, our loves, our gods,
Pass on, because we do.

2009-07-30T06:31:00.001-07:00

Open all the windows for me!
Throw open all the doors!
Pull the whole house up over me!
I want to live freely, out in the open,
I want to make gestures beyond my body,
To run like the rain streaming down over walls,
To be stepped on like stones down the broad streets,
To sink like heavy weights to the bottom of the sea,
And all this voluptuously, a feeling alien to me now!

2009-07-18T17:28:00.000-07:00

How can I tell what I'll be, I who don't know what I am?
Be what I think? But I keep thinking I am so many things!
And so many people think of being the same thing, there just can't be that many!
Genius? At this moment
A hundred thousand heads are thinking they are geniuses like me,
And who know if history will remember even one of them.
From all those dreams of glory there will be nothing but manure in the end.
No, I don't believe in myself.
In every asylum there are madmen sure of so much!
I, sure of nothing, am I more sure or less sure than they?
No, not even of myself . . .
In how many garrets and non-garrets of the world
Are these self styled geniuses dreaming now?
How many high minded aspirations, noble and lucid --
Yes, really high minded, noble and lucid --,
And who knows, even practicable,
Will ever see the real light of the day or get a hearing?
The world is made for those born to conquer it,
Not those who dream of conquering it, right though they may be.
I've dreamed of more things than Napoleon went and did.
I've taken to my so-called heart more humanity than Christ ever did.
I've secretly thought up more philosophies than Kant ever wrote down.
Yet I am, and maybe always will be, the man in the garret,
Though I don't live in one;
I'll always be the one who wasn't born for it;
I'll always be the one with all the promise;
I'll always be the one waiting for the door to open at the wall without a door,
Who sang his anthem to infinity in a chicken coop,
Who heard the voice of God in a covered well.
Believe in myself? No, I don't, nor in anything.
Let nature pour down upon my burning head
Her sun, her rain, the wind ruffling my hair,
And let the rest come, if it will or must, or not at all.
Cardiac cases enslaved by the stars,
We've conquered the world before getting out of bed,
But we wake and the world is opaque,
We get up and the world looks strange,
We go out in the street and there is the whole earth,
Plus Solar System, Milky Way, and the old Indefinitude.

2009-07-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

To be great, be whole; exclude
Nothing, exaggerate nothing that is you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
The whole moon gleams in every pool,
It rides so high.

2009-07-06T07:02:00.001-07:00

Today the sky is heavy like the thought of never making port . . .
The drizzle is empty . . . The hour feels like it's passed . . .
Not to have something like sea lanes for ships! . . . Absorbed,
Your gaze, self-distanced from itself, is a curse without meaning . . .

2009-06-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

But the Tobacco Show Owner has come to the door and stands there now.
I look at him, straining my half turned neck,
Straining my half-blind soul.
He'll die and so will I.
He'll leave his signboard, I'll leave my poems.
After a while his signboard will perish too, and so will my poems.
A little later the street will die where his signboard hung,
And so will the language my poems were written in.
Then the spinning planet where all this happened will die,
In other satellites in other systems something like people
Will go on making things like poems and living under things like signboards,
Always one against another,
Always one thing as useless as another,
Always the impossible thing as useless as the real thing,
Always the fundamental mystery as certain as the sleeping surface mystery,
Always this thing or that, or neither one nor the other.
But now a man's gone into the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?)
And the plausible reality of it all suddenly hits me.
I'm getting up, full of energy, convinced, human,
And about to write these lines, which say the opposite.

2009-06-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

I light a cigarette and think of writing them,
And in the cigarette I savor my liberation from all thoughts,
I follow the smoke like a lane of my own,
For one sensitive, dexterous moment enjoying
The freedom from all speculation
And the consciousness that metaphysics comes from feeling out of sorts.

Then I fall back in my chair
And go on smoking.
As long as fate permits, I'll go on smoking.

2009-06-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

I'm a keeper of sheep.
The sheep are my thoughts
And my thoughts are all sensations.
I think with my eyes and ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.

To think a flower is to see it and smell it
And to eat a fruit is to taste its meaning.

That's why on a hot day
When I ache from enjoying it so much,
And stretch out on the grass,
Closing my warm eyes,
I feel my whole body lying full length in reality,
I know the truth and I'm happy.

2009-05-28T07:08:00.000-07:00

O sea of salt, how much of all your salt
Contains the tears of Portugal?
So we might sail, how many mothers wept,
How many sons have prayed in vain!
How many girls betrothed remained unwed
That we might possess you, Sea!

Was it worth the effort? Anything's worth it
If the soul's not petty.
If you'd sail beyond the Cape
Sail you must past cares, past grief.
God gave perils to the sea and sheer depth,
But mirrored heaven there.

2009-05-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

Once again I see you, City of my childhood terrifyingly lost . . .

City of my sorrow and joy, I dream here again . . .
I? But am I the same person who lived here once and returned,
And came back here again and again?
And now come back here again, am I?
Or are we, all the I's I was and were here,
A string of bead-beings strung all together by a memory strand,
A string of dreams of myself which someone outside me dreamt up?

Once again I see you ---
With a heart more distant, soul less my own.

Once again I see you --- Lisbon, the Tagus, and all ---,
Useless passerby of you and of me,
Stranger in this place as of every other,
Accidental in life as in the soul,
Phantom wandering the halls of memory,
To the squealing of rats and the squeaking of boards,
In the doomed castle where life must be lived . . .

Once again I see you,
Shadow passing through shadows,
Shining for one moment in an unknown, funereal light,
Then entering the night like a ship's wake disappearing,
In water slowly become inaudible . . .

Once again I see you,
But myself, alas, I fail to see!
Shattered, the magical mirror where I saw myself identical,
And in each fateful fragment I descry only a piece of myself ---
A piece of you and of myself . . .

2009-05-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

I don't want the doors bolted!
I don't want the safes locked!
I want to horn in there, put my nose in, be dragged off,
I want to be somebody else's wounded member,
I want to be spilled from crates,
I want to be thrown in the ocean,
I want them to come looking for me at home with lewd intentions ---
Just so I'm not always sitting here quietly,
Just so I'm not simply writing these verses!

I'm against in-between spaces in the world!
I'm for the compenetrated, material contiguity of objects!
I'm for physical bodies commingling like souls,
Not just dynamically but statically too!

I want to fly and fall from way up high!
To be thrown like a hand grenade!
To be brought to a sudden stop . . . To be lifted to . . .
The highest, abstract end-point of me and everything else!

2009-05-15T07:29:00.001-07:00

I made of myself something I didn't know,
And what I could become, I didn't.
The fancy costume I put on was wrong.
They saw me straight for what I wasn't;
I didn't disabuse them so I lost myself.
When I tried taking off the mask,
It stuck to my face.
When I pulled it off and looked in the mirror,
I'd grown older.
I was drunk and couldn't get into the fancy costume I hadn't taken off.
So I threw away the mask and slept in the cloakroom
Like a dog they let stay in the house
Because it's harmless,
And I'm about to write this story to prove I am sublime.

2009-05-15T07:03:00.000-07:00

Glory weighs like a precious burden,
Reputation like a fever,
Love wearies, being so searching and serious,
Knowledge never finds anything,
And life achingly passes, knowing all this . . .

2009-05-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

One brother's vessel vanished
From the indefinite sea.
Another asked the King leave,
By faith and custom's fiat,
To go and seek his brother
Through boundless seas and darkest mist.

Time passed. Neither one nor the other
Returned from the deep and distant ocean,
Unknown to the nation on whom
It laid the enigma it had made.
Then a third beseeched the King
To search for both. The King refused.

*

Servants hear him pass
The manor house as if enchained.
And, when seen, a fevered figure
With anguished eyes
Stares bitterly ahead
Into the forbidden blue beyond.

Two brothers who share our Name, Lord,
The Power and the Glory,
Both strove in the sea of ages
Toward your agelessness;
And with them went that part of us
Which in spirit makes heroes possible.

From our wretched prison house
We ache to seek our heroes:
It's the search for who we are
Far within us; in fevered yearning
We lift our hands to God.

But God forbids our going hence.

2009-04-30T06:38:00.000-07:00

The poet is a faker. He
Fakes it so completely,
He even fakes he's suffering
The pain he's really feeling.

And those who read his writing
Fully feel while reading
Not that pain of his that's double,
But theirs, completely fictional.

So on its tracks goes round and round,
To entertain the reason,
That wound-up little train
We call the heart of man.

2009-04-24T08:01:00.000-07:00

The sleep that comes over me,
The mental sleep that physically hits me,
The universal sleep that personally overcomes me --
To others
Such a sleep must seem a sleep to fall asleep in,
The sleep of someone wanting to go to sleep,
The very sleep that is sleep.

But it's more, it goes deeper, higher than that:
It's the sleep encompassing every disappointment.
It's the sleep that synthesizes all despair,
It's the sleep of feeling there's a world within me
Without my having said yes or no to it.

Yet the sleep that comes over me
Is just like ordinary sleep.
Being tired at least softens you
Being run-down at least quiets you,
Giving up at least puts an end to trying,
And the end at least is giving up trying to hope.

There's a sound of a window opening.
Indifferent, I turn my head to the left,
Looking over the shoulder that felt it,
And see through the half-opened window
The girl on the third floor across the street
Leaning out, her blue eyes searching for someone.
Who?
My indifference asks.
And all this is sleep.

My God, so much sleep! . . .

2009-04-21T16:26:00.000-07:00

One God is born. Others die. Truth
Did not come or go. Error changed.
Eternity is different now.
What happened was better always.

Blind Science plows the useless sod.
Fool Faith lives the dream of its observance.
A new God is but a word.
Search not, nor believe. All is hidden.

2009-04-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

A dock darkly reflected in motionless waters,
The bustle on board ship,
Oh, the roving, restless soul of all boarding passengers,
The symbolic milling crowds among whom nothing abides,
And among whom, when the ship returns to port,
Some change has always ocurred on board!

Oh, the continual drunken Diversity of flights and departures!
Eternal soul of navigators and their navigations!
Hulls slowly flashing in water
As the ship takes off from port!
To float like the very core of life, to break like a voice,
To live the moment tremulously on eternal waters,
To wake up to days more immediate than any in Europe,
To see mysterious ports on the wide wastes of ocean,
To round distant capes and come across sudden vast landscapes
Past countless stunning hillsides . . .

Ah, the remote beaches, the docks glimpsed from far away,
Then the beaches looming up, the docks seen from close up.
The mystery of every departure and every arrival,
The sad instability, the incomprehensibility
Of this impossible universe
Felt in the skin more intensely at every seafaring moment.
The absurd gulping sobs our souls pour out
Over the expanses of various seas with isles in the distance,
Over far-off island coasts left behind as we pass,
Over ports grown clearer with houses and people
As the ship approaches.

2009-04-10T05:38:00.001-07:00

Whatever we make of this useless life
Is all the same, whether it's glory,
Reputation, love, knowledge or life itself --
As if it were simply
Some memory of a game well played
And a wager won
By the best player.

2009-04-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

Nothing holds me to anything.
I want fifty things at once.
With a meat-hungry anguish I yearn
For what I don't know --
Definitely for the indefinite . . .
Restless I sleep and live in the restless dream
Of someone who sleeps restlessly, half of me dreaming.

They closed all the abstract and necessary doors on me.
They drew the curtains on all the hypotheses I might have seen on the street.
There is no house on the side street with the number they gave me.

I woke to the same life I departed after sleeping.
Even my dream armies suffered defeat.
Even my dreams felt false as I dreamed them.
Even the life I only desire -- even that life -- cloys . . .

2009-04-02T07:33:00.000-07:00

I understand in fits and starts;
I write betweentimes when I am not tired;
And a boredom that's bored even of itself drags me ashore;
I've no idea how the future and fate will treat my aimless anguish;
I don't know what impossible southern islands await me shipwrecked;
Or what palm-groves of letters will give me at least a line of verse.

No, I don't know this, that, or anything else . . .
And deep in my soul where I dream what I dreamt,
In the furthest recesses of my soul where I live memory without any reason
(And the past is a natural fog of fake tears),
On the shortcuts and roads in the faraway woods
Where I hypothesized my being,
The last remnants of my ultimate illusion
Flee, dismantled,
My dream armies vanquished without ever having been,
My latent cohorts shattered to pieces in God.

2009-03-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

He came by, wanting to speak with me on a downtown street,
That poorly dressed man, a beggar by trade, as shown in his face,
Who gets along with me and I with him;
And I, in a mutual, wide, effusive gesture, gave him all I had
(Except, of course, what was in my pocket where I have got more money:
I'm not stupid, nor a busy Russian novelist,
And as for Romanticism, yes, but in small doses . . .)

I have a soft spot for people like that,
Especially when they don't deserve it.

2009-03-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

Being a vagrant and beggar is not being vagrant and beggar:
It's being off to one side of social ladder,
It's being unable to follow the norms of life,
The real or sentimental norms of life --
It's not being a Supreme Court Justice, a reliable employee, a prostitute,
It's not being poverty-stricken, an exploited worker,
It's not being sick with some incurable illness,
It's not being thirsty for justice or a cavalry captain,
It's not being, in a word, those socially conscious characters of the novelists,
Bursting with literary words because they have every reason to shed tears,
And rebel against society because they assume it's their right to.

No: anything but being right!
Anything but caring about humanity!
Anything but giving into humanitarian impulses!
What good's a thrill if it's got some external reason?

2009-03-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

Yes, being the vagrant and beggar I am,
Is not being a vagrant and beggar -- that's common enough:
It's being isolated in our soul -- that's what being a vagrant is,
It's needing to beg the days to go by and disregard us -- that's what being a beggar is.

Everything else is stupid like a Dostoyevsky or a Gorky.
Everything else is being hungry or having nothing to wear.
And even though that happens, it happens to so many people
Its not worth feeling sorry for those who it happens to.

I'm a vagrant and a hell of a beggar -- that is, in the metamorphic sense,
And I'm curling up in the deepest charity for myself.

2009-03-09T08:50:00.000-07:00

Poor Alvaro de Campos!
So terribly isolated in his life! Feeling so utterly depressed!
Poor guy, slumped in the armchair of his melancholy!
Poor guy, with tears (real tears) in his eyes,
Who today gave away, in one grand, liberal, Muscovite gesture
All that he had -- from the pocket where he had only a bit --
To that poor man who wasn't poor and had professionally sad eyes.

Poor Alvaro de Campos, nobody cares about him!
Poor thing, feeling so sorry for himself!
Yes, the poor guy!
Worse off than the many other vagrants who straddle and stray,
Who are beggars and beg,
Because the human soul is a bottomless pit.

I'm someone who knows. Poor guy!
How good to be able to rebel in my soul at a political meeting!
But I am not even that softheaded!
I don't even have the excuse of being able to hold social opinions.
I don't, as a matter of fact, have any excuse at all: I'm lucid.

Don't try changing my convictions: I'm lucid.

I already said it: I'm lucid.
Don't give me your heartfelt esthetics: I'm lucid.
Shit! I'm lucid.

2009-03-04T10:18:00.000-08:00

One after another, hard-pressed waves
Curl in their green motion
And hiss white foam into
The brownness of sea shores.

Leisurely clouds one after another
Break open their round motion
And sun burns the air space
Between the scanty clouds.

Indifferent to me, as I to her,
This fair day's disposition
Takes little from my sense
Of time evaporating.

Only a vague inconsequential ache
Halts a moment at the portal of my soul
And, after staring briefly at me,
Passes on, smiling at nothing.

2009-03-04T10:05:00.000-08:00

Let us be like the Persians in this tale,
And if somewhere out there,
Nearby or far away, we're summoned
By war, by country, by life,
Let them summon us in vain, and let
Each, under some friendly shade,
Dream of his opponent,
And the chess game, of its indifference.

2009-02-28T07:06:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-24T11:30:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-22T10:18:00.000-08:00

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 . . .

2009-02-21T21:32:00.000-08:00

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 . . .

2009-02-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-19T16:24:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-18T17:23:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-17T15:12:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-02-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-10T18:58:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-09T18:50:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-07T09:00:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-07T08:16:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-06T09:18:00.001-08:00

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.

2009-02-06T08:02:00.000-08:00

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 . . .

2009-02-05T11:47:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-02-05T09:04:00.001-08:00

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.

2009-02-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

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!

2009-02-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

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.

2009-02-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

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...

2009-02-01T19:12:00.001-08:00

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.

2009-01-31T17:52:00.000-08:00

Ah, how delightful
Not to do one's duty,
Having a book to read
And not read it!
Reading's a bore,
Studying's worthless.
The sun gilds things
Without literature.

Willy nilly runs the river
Without an original edition.
And the breeze, this very one,
So natural, matutinal,
Since it has time, is in no hurry...

2009-01-30T09:31:00.000-08:00

Lightly, quickly, soft,
A bird song
Climbs the sky as day
Begins.
I listen -it is gone.
It seemed to stop only because
I listened.

Never, never in anything-
At dawn, in splendid daylight,
Or in the golden sunset-
Have I found
A pleasure that would last
Beyond the nothingness, the loss, before coming
To enjoy it.

2009-01-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

Symbols...
I'm tired of thinking...
Finally I lift my eyes to find your eyes eying me.
You smile, knowing just what I was thinking...