Editor’s Note: This text is available in English and Portuguese. Click “Español” to read in Portuguese.
Motive Unlike Cecilia’s1
I sing because life is incomplete.
To banish tears, that old wives’ tale,
the blessing and salvation of the poet.
Remembering Rimbaud
I cry to the heavens for the strength
to scream my no
at the top of my lungs.
For cowardly delicacy
I don’t want to lose my life.
Mystery
I return to the method of Descartes
dividing the problem into parts.
And so I take the word mystery
and separate its phonemes
one by one, like petals from a flower.
M y s t e r y
What remains are minor questions
and no solution to any of them.
I still don’t know if gathered shadows are
the eye’s incompetence
or the dimming of the stars.
Phases of the Moon
Li Po was wrong to say that man
would never reach the moon.
(They’ve even brought back sand from there)
Li Po was right to say: men
today no longer see the moon of yesterday.
(Not because its splendor has faded
but because our gaze has changed)
We know something about now and yesterday.
Of the future we have nothing but questions.
In the Middle of the Road2
In the middle of our road
there was another stone.
Not the poet’s stone
verbal abstract allegorical.
Instead there was a renal stone
concrete chronic solid.
In fact, a plural stone:
one removed, another appeared.
We will never forget
home turned into hospital.
Inside a body was a stone
an obstacle to carnal love.
There was a stone in the road
to reality’s paradise.
Translated by Alexis Levitin
1 Cecelia Meireles, famous Brazilian modernist poet who wrote the following:
I sing because the moment exists
and life itself is complete.
I am not happy, I am not sad.
I am a poet.
2 Carlos Drummond De Andrade wrote a famous poem “In the Middle of the Road,” which begins with the line: “In the middle of the road there was a stone.”
