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 is only because I was once a different I: 

A child delighted to see his face in the bottom of the well. 

I see 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.

 O morning that breaks without looking at me,

O sun that shines without caring that I see you,

It's for me that you

Are true and real,

For it's in the foil to my desire

That I feel nature and life to be real.

In what denies me I feel

They exist and I am small,

And in this knowledge I become great

Even as the wave which, tossed by storms

High into the air, returns

With more weight to a deeper sea

I don't want the sincere gifts
You pretend to give me
As presents of your offering.
Give me what I'll love,
Grieving for it lost, twice
Over, for you and for me.

Better, promise me it without
Giving it, so the loss
Will be more in the hope
Than in the memory.

I'll take no more displeasure
Than in life's continuing,
Seeing that as days pass, what's
Hoped for is delayed, which is nothing.

I see a butterfly go by
And for the first time in the universe I notice
That butterflies do not have color or movement,
Even as flowers do not have scent or color.
Color is what has color in the butterfly's wings,
Movement is what moves in the butterfly's movement,
Scent is what has scent in the flower's scent.
The butterfly is just a butterfly
And the flower just a flower.

I don't believe in God because I have never seen him.
If he wanted me to believe in him,
Then surely he'd come and speak to me.
He would enter by my door
Saying, "Here I am!"

(This may sound ridiculous to those who,
Because they aren't used to looking at things,
Can't understand a man who speaks of them
In the way that looking at things teaches.)

But if God is the flowers and trees
And hills and sun and moon,
Then I believe in him,
I believe in him at every moment,
And my life is all a prayer and a mass
And a communion by way of my eyes and ears.

But if God is the flowers and the trees
And hills and sun and moon,
Then why should I call him God?
I'll call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moon.
Because if to my eyes he made himself
Sun and moon and flowers and trees and hills,
If he appears to me as trees and hills
And moon and sun and flowers,
Then he wants me to know him
As trees and hills and flowers and sun and moon.

And so I obey him.
(Do I know more about God than God knows about himself?)
I obey him by living spontaneously
As a man who opens his eyes and sees,
And I call him moon and sun and flowers and hills and trees,
And I love him without thinking of him,
And I think him by seeing and hearing,
And I am with him at every moment.

The child who thinks about fairies and believes in them

Acts like a sick god, but like a god nonetheless,
For although affirming the existence of what doesn't exist,
He knows how it is that things exist, which is by existing,
He knows that existence exists and cannot be explained,
He knows there is no reason for anything to exist,
And he knows that to exist is to occupy a point.
What he doesn't know is that thought is not a point.

Ah! They want a light that's better than the sun's!
They want meadows greener than these!
They want flowers more beautiful than these which I see!
For me this sun, these meadows and these flowers are enough.
But if they weren't enough,
What I would want is a sun more sun than the sun,
Meadows more meadows than these meadows,
Flowers more flowers than these flowers --
Everything more ideal than what it is, in the same way and same manner!
That thing over there more there than it is!
Yes, sometimes I weep for the perfect body that doesn't exist.
But the perfect body is the body that's the most body of all,
And the rest is the dreams of men,
The myopia of those who see little,
And the desire to sit felt by those who don't know how to stand.
All of Christianity is a dream of chairs.

And the soul is what doesn't appear,
The perfect soul is the one that never appears:
The soul that is made out of body,
The absolute body of things,
Existing -- absolutely real -- without shadows or errors,
The exact and entire coincidence of a thing with itself.