Cágado

Do espelho, aceno
A boca banguela
A boca torta
A perna rota
O pé sem bota.

Quem acena é um velho e
Num só corpo gordo e descarnado
De olho baço
De ventre redondo
De peito de pombo

Reúne em si
Uma nuvem de muxoxos
Uma rede de queixumes
Um só gemido, surdo como um trovão
E o sorriso dum natimorto

Pulo

A água da fonte, altaneia
querendo dançar com a chuva que
cai

imagens na irrelevante janela de um veículo qualquer

A canção do Monstro do Lago Ness

Sssnnnwhuffffll?
Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl?
Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl.
Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl –
gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm.
Hovoplodok – doplodovok – plovodokot-doplodokosh?
Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok!
Zgra kra gka fok!
Grof grawff gahf?
Gombl mbl bl –
blm plm,
blm plm,
blm plm,
blp.

- Edwin Morgan 

O Tell Me The Truth About Love

Some say love's a little boy, 
And some say it's a bird, 
Some say it makes the world go round,
Some say that's absurd, 
And when I asked the man next door, 
Who looked as if he knew, 
His wife got very cross indeed, 
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas, 
Or the ham in a temperance hotel? 
Does its odour remind one of llamas, 
Or has it a comforting smell? 
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is, 
Or soft as eiderdown fluff? 
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges? 
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it 
In cryptic little notes, 
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats; 
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides, 
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian, 
Or boom like a military band? 
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand? 
Is its singing at parties a riot? 
Does it only like Classical stuff? 
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet? 
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house; 
It wasn't even there; 
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead, 
And Brighton's bracing air. 
I don't know what the blackbird sang, 
Or what the tulip said; 
But it wasn't in the chicken-run, 
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces? 
Is it usually sick on a swing? 
Does it spend all its time at the races, 
or fiddling with pieces of string? 
Has it views of its own about money? 
Does it think Patriotism enough? 
Are its stories vulgar but funny? 
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose? 
Will it knock on my door in the morning, 
Or tread in the bus on my toes? 
Will it come like a change in the weather? 
Will its greeting be courteous or rough? 
Will it alter my life altogether? 
O tell me the truth about love. 



-WH Auden

Nine One Word Poems

A Far Cool Beautiful Thing, Vanishing
      blue


The Dear Green Plaice
     Glasgow


Homage to Zukofsky
      the


The Dilemmas of a Horn
     roncesvalles


Ada Nada Paradada
     dom


Lattice, Lettuce, Ladders
     vasarely


Wet Dry Wet Dry Wet Asdic
     dolphins


Dangerous Glory
     morning


O Vapour-trails! O Water-melons!
     voznesensky

-Edwin Morgan

Para punir os homens

Para punir os homens
por seus numerosos pecados

de pele pura

e cabelos pretos e longos

eu fui feita

-Yosano Akiko 

(Traduzido por Diogo Kaupatez)

Desiderata

deseo lo que no tengo
(no tu cuerpo que abrazo)
deseo tu deseo

deseo que desees lo que no tienes
(no mi cuerpo que abrazas)
deseo que desees mi deseo

no deseo a quien no desea mi deseo
no deseo a quien no desea que yo desee su deseo




-Ulalume Gonzáles de León

Icosasphere

'In Buckinghamshire hedgerows
   the birds nesting in the merged green density,
      weave little bits of string and moths and feathers
   and thistledown,
          in parabolic concentric curves'
   and, working for concavity, leave spherical feats
    of rare efficiency;
       whereas through lack of integration,

avid for someone's fortune,
   three were slain and ten committed perjury,
      six died, two killed themselves, and two paid
    fines for risks they'd run.
            But then there is the icosasphere
   in which at last we have steel-cutting at its
                  summit of economy,
       since twenty triangles conjoined, can wrap one

ball or double-rounded shell
   with almost no waste, so geometrically
       neat, it's an icosahedron.  Would the engineers
                    making one,
            or Mr. J. O. Jackson tell us
   how the Egyptians could have set up seventy-eight-
                   foot solid granite vertically?
       We should like to know how that was done.



-Marianne Moore

Grey rain

The elemental joy of rain
Falls in thick sheets upon my chest
A sensual, lambent cold;
Thin trails of grey pollution
Draw arabesques on my mottled skin.
And the cars
the cars
throw splashing, noisy fountains everywhere.

A grey rain turns brown on the floor
a brown rain slicks oily and
multicoloured
around a garbage-bag, draining
then into the black mouth of a drain.
(They call drains wolves' mouths here, and sometimes,
I guess, they could swallow a child -
or two
or perhaps a half dozen, and
 BURP.)

The rain noises about with itself
noises the wind
the concrete, zinc, steel, leaves, grass, soil.
It's a rain of colourful noise as much as grey water.

Bespattering bemused
(colourful) children and bedraggled
(grey) people, and bedraggled
(colourful) people.
And wet, smelly dogs.
With dirty, dirty water.

A rat swims, dead or alive
downhill.
A cat looks and drools from a
window.

A child scolded, a nanny irate
the child gets the rain
the nanny, does not; sober
as a judge she is

and greyer.

Madrigal esfumaçado

Teu seio desenhado congela
como o olhar de uma cobra.
Teus olhos...dos olhos não sei.

Entre os ombros lisos, as costas
são tesas como as de uma gata.
Teus olhos...dos olhos não sei.

Tua voz é rouca ou macia
me confunde de noite e de dia
Teus olhos...dos olhos não sei.

Andando ou parada, sorrindo
ou cansada, és mistério que arde
Teus olhos? Ai, deles não sei!

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
arms and legs made of Limoges,
lips like Vin Du Rhône,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes
open and shut.
Open to say, 
Good Day Mama,
and shut for the thrust
of the unicorn.
She is unsoiled.
She is as white as a bonefish.

Once there was a lovely virgin
called Snow White.
Say she was thirteen.
Her stepmother,
a beauty in her own right,
though eaten, of course, by age,
would hear of no beauty surpassing her own.
Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
The stepmother had a mirror to which she referred--
something like the weather forecast--
a mirror that proclaimed 
the one beauty of the land.
She would ask,
Looking glass upon the wall,
who is fairest of us all?
And the mirror would reply,
You are the fairest of us all.
Pride pumped in her like poison.

Suddenly one day the mirror replied,
Queen, you are full fair, ‘tis true,
but Snow White is fairer than you.
Until that moment Snow White
had been no more important
than a dust mouse under the bed.
But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand
and four whiskers over her lip
so she condemned Snow White
to be hacked to death.
Bring me her heart, she said to the hunter,
and I will salt it and eat it.
The hunter, however, let his prisoner go
and brought a boar’s heart back to the castle.
The queen chewed it up like a cube steak.
Now I am fairest, she said,
lapping her slim white fingers.

Snow White walked in the wildwood
for weeks and weeks.
At each turn there were twenty doorways
and at each stood a hungry wolf,
his tongue lolling out like a worm.
The birds called out lewdly,
talking like pink parrots,
and the snakes hung down in loops,
each a noose for her sweet white neck.
On the seventh week
she came to the seventh mountain
and there she found the dwarf house.
It was as droll as a honeymoon cottage
and completely equipped with
seven beds, seven chairs, seven forks
and seven chamber pots.
Snow White ate seven chicken livers
and lay down, at last, to sleep.

The dwarfs, those little hot dogs,
walked three times around Snow White,
the sleeping virgin.  They were wise
and wattled like small czars.
Yes.  It’s a good omen,
they said, and will bring us luck.
They stood on tiptoes to watch
Snow White wake up.  She told them
about the mirror and the killer-queen
and they asked her to stay and keep house.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
Soon she will know you are here.
While we are away in the mines
during the day, you must not
open the door.

Looking glass upon the wall . . .
The mirror told
and so the queen dressed herself in rags
and went out like a peddler to trap Snow White.
She went across seven mountains.
She came to the dwarf house
and Snow White opened the door
and bought a bit of lacing.
The queen fastened it tightly
around her bodice,
as tight as an Ace bandage,
so tight that Snow White swooned.
She lay on the floor, a plucked daisy.
When the dwarfs came home they undid the lace
and she revived miraculously.
She was as full of life as soda pop.
Beware of your stepmother,
they said.
She will try once more.

Looking glass upon the wall. . .
Once more the mirror told
and once more the queen dressed in rags
and once more Snow White opened the door.
This time she bought a poison comb, 
a curved eight-inch scorpion,
and put it in her hair and swooned again.
The dwarfs returned and took out the comb
and she revived miraculously.
She opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie.
Beware, beware, they said,
but the mirror told,
the queen came,
Snow White, the dumb bunny,
opened the door
and she bit into a poison apple
and fell down for the final time.
When the dwarfs returned
they undid her bodice,
they looked for a comb,
but it did no good.
Though they washed her with wine
and rubbed her with butter
it was to no avail.
She lay as still as a gold piece.

The seven dwarfs could not bring themselves
to bury her in the black ground
so they made a glass coffin
and set it upon the seventh mountain
so that all who passed by
could peek in upon her beauty.
A prince came one June day
and would not budge.
He stayed so long his hair turned green
and still he would not leave.
The dwarfs took pity upon him
and gave him the glass Snow White--
its doll’s eyes shut forever--
to keep in his far-off castle.
As the prince’s men carried the coffin
they stumbled and dropped it
and the chunk of apple flew out
of her throat and she woke up miraculously.

And thus Snow White became the prince’s bride.
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding feast
and when she arrived there were
red-hot iron shoes,
in the manner of red-hot roller skates,
clamped upon her feet.
First your toes will smoke
and then your heels will turn black
and you will fry upward like a frog,
she was told.
And so she danced until she was dead,
a subterranean figure,
her tongue flicking in and out
like a gas jet.
Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do.

-Anne Sexton

Meiji Haiku

Iron tracks
Smoke
Noise and fleeing rabbits

Bhagavad Gita, capítulo 5, slóka 18

Na visão do sábio humilde
Não existe diferença
Entre o brâmane educado
O elefante a vaca o cão
E o comedor de cachorro


-traduzido por Rogério Duarte

The Golden Gate

To make a start more swift than weighty,
Hail Muse. Dear Reader, once upon
A time, say circa 1980,
There lived a man. His name was John.
Successful in his field though only
Twenty-six, respected, lonely,
One evening as he walked across
Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss
Of a red frisbee almost brained him.
He thought, «If I died, who’d be sad?
Who’d weep? Who’d gloat? Who would be glad?
Would anybody?» As it pained him,
He turned from this dispiriting theme
To ruminations less extreme.


-Vikram Seth, início do romance feito na estrofe Onegin. 

Howl

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
     starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking 
     for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
     connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking 
     in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating 
     across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw
     Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs 
     illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
     hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the 
     scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing 
     obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their 
     money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through
     the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo 
     with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise 
     Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and
     cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in 
     the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, 
     illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns,
     wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of 
     teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon 
     and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, 
     ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from 
     Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of 
     wheels and children brought them down shuddering 
     mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of 
     brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out 
     and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate 
     Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen 
     jukebox, 
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to 
     Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the 
     stoops off fire escapes off windowsills of Empire State out 
     of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and 
     memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of 
     hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and 
     nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on 
     the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of 
     ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and 
     migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak 
     furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad
     yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken
     hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
     through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and 
     bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at
     their feet in Kansas, who loned it through the streets of
     Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary
     indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in
     supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on
     the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz
     or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to
     converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and
     so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind
     nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of
     poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in
     beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark
     skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the
     narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square
     weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos
     wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten
     Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and
     trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in
     policecars for committing no crime but their own wild
     cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off
     the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists,
     and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors,
     caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and
     the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their
     semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob
     behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked
     angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one  
     eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew
     that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does
     nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
     threads of the craftsman’s loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a
     sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the
     bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and
     ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt
     and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the
     sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to
     sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under
     barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen
     night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and
     Adonis of Denver--joy to the memory of his innumerable lays
     of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’
     rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt
     waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
     & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, &
     hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams,
     woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out
     of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of
     Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment
     offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the
     snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open
     to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of
     the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon &
     their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at
     the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full
     of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and
     rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame
     under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of
     theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations
     which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas
     dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for
     Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads
     every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave
     up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought
     they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison
     Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of
     the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of
     the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister
     intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs
     of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and
     walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of
     Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free
     beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway
     window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried
     all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot
     smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s
     German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into
     the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of
     colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the
     each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or
     Birmingham jazz incarnation, who drove crosscountry
     seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had
     a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to
     Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver &
     brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find
     out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each
     other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul
     illuminated its hair for a second, 
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible
     criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their
     hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to
     tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the
     black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
     daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism &
     were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and
     subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of
     the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of
     suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol
     electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy
     pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong
     table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and
     tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of
     the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering
     with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the
     midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life
     a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out
     of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m.
     and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the
     last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental
     furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the
     closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little
     bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re
     really in the total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a
     sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the
     catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through
     images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul
     between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and
     set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping
     with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and
     stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking
     with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform
     to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting
     down here what might be left to say in time come after
     death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn
     shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked
     mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani
     saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their
     own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls
     and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
     dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys
     sobbing in armies!  Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! 
     Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone
     soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch
     whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of
     war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is
     running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! 
     Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!  Moloch whose
     ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose
     skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless
     Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the
     fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the 
     cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is
     electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter
     of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless
     hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! 
     Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and
     manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a
     consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out
     of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in
     Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton
     treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral
     nations! invincible mad houses granite cocks! monstrous
     bombs! 
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements,
     trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists
     and is everywhere about us! 
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the
     American river! 
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload
     of sensitive bullshit! 
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down
     the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal
     screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! 
     down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the
     holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof to
     solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
     street!

-Allen Ginsberg

Prière d'un petit enfant nègre

Seigneur, je suis très fatigué.

Je suis né fatigué.

Et j'ai beaucoup marché depuis le chant du coq

Et le morne est bien haut qui mène à leur école.

Faites, je vous en prie, que je n'y aille plus.

Quand la nuit flotte encore dans le mystère des bois

Où glissent les esprits que l'aube vient chasser.

Je veux aller pieds nus par les rouges sentiers

Que cuisent les flammes de midi,

Je veux dormir ma sieste au pied des lourds manguiers,

Je veux me réveiller

Lorsque là-bas mugit la sirène des blancs

Et que l'Usine

Sur l'océan des cannes

Comme un bateau ancré

Vomit dans la campagne son équipage nègre...

Faites, je vous en prie, que je n'y aille plus.  

 

 

Pour qu'il devienne pareil 

Aux messieurs de la ville 

Aux messieurs comme il faut. 

Mais moi, je ne veux pas 

Devenir, comme ils disent, 

Un monsieur de la ville, 

Un monsieur comme il faut.

Où sont les sacs repus 

Que gonfle un sucre brun autant que ma peau brune. 

Je préfère, vers l'heure où la lune amoureuse 

Parle bas à l'oreille des cocotiers penchés, 

Ecouter ce que dit dans la nuit 

La voix cassée d'un vieux qui raconte en fumant 

Les histoires de Zamba et de compère Lapin, 

Et bien d'autres choses encore 

Qui ne sont pas dans les livres.

Pourquoi faut-il de plus apprendre dans des livres 

Qui nous parlent de choses qui ne sont point d'ici ?

Triste comme 

Ces messieurs de la ville, 

Ces messieurs comme il faut 

Qui ne savent plus danser le soir au clair de lune 

Qui ne savent plus marcher sur la chair de leurs pieds 

Qui ne savent plus conter les contes aux veillées.

Seigneur, je ne veux plus aller à leur école,

Je veux suivre mon père dans les ravines fraîches

Seigneur, je ne veux plus aller à leur école, 

Ils racontent qu'il faut qu'un petit nègre y aille 

Je préfère flâner le long des sucreries 

Les nègres, vous le savez, n'ont que trop travaillé. 

Et puis elle est vraiment trop triste leur école, 

Seigneur, je ne veux plus aller à leur école !

-Guy Tirolien

Se o meu pescador pescasse

Se o meu pescador me pescasse

pelo arpão me agarrasse os versos

um a um, sem pressa

a melhor palavra do mar...

Mas em que lugar da asa

a palavra poderia ser mais bela?

Com que cheiro? Com que sabor?

Onde seria o lugar do sol

Com que cor? Com que brilho?

E sei que hei de escolher

depressa mas devagar

a palavra mais carnuda para comer

E vou comer intensamente

Com toda forca dos meus (d)entes

na ponta dos dedos

as palavras que não me calo

E um peixe com asas

Há de nascer

E há de pescar-me no alto

o pescador

Espero

-Tânia Tomé

Carlos XII da Suécia cavalgava na Ucrânia

Könige in Legenden
sind wie Berge im Abend. Blenden
jeden, zu dem sie sich wenden.
Die Gurte! um ihre Lenden
und die lastenden Mantelenden
sind Länder und Leben wert.
Mit den reichgekleideten Händen
geht, schlank und nackt, das Schwert.

                                    ---

Ein junger König aus Norden war
in der Ukraine geschlagen.
Der hasste Frühling und Frauenhaar
und die Harfen und was sie sagen.
Der ritt auf einem grauen Pferd,
sein Auge schaute grau
und hatte niemals Glanz begehrt
zu Füßen einer Frau.
Keine war seinem Blicke blond,
keine hat küssen ihn gekonnt;
und wenn er zornig war,
so riss er einen Perlenmond
aus wunderschönem Haar.
Und wenn ihn Trauer überkam,
so machte er ein Mädchen zahm
und forschte, wessen Ring sie nahm
und wem sie ihren bot -
und: hetzte ihr den Bräutigam
mit hundert Hunden tot.

Und er verließ sein graues Land,
das ohne Stimme war,
und ritt in einen Widerstand
und kämpfte um Gefahr,
bis ihn das Wunder überwand:
wie träumend ging ihm seine Hand
von Eisenband zu Eisenband
und war kein Schwert darin;
er war zum Schauen aufgewacht:
es schmeichelte die schöne Schlacht
um seinen Eigensinn.
Er saß zu Pferde: ihm entging
keine Gebärde rings.
Auf Silber sprach jetzt Ring zu Ring,
und Stimme war in jedem Ding,
und wie in vielen Glocken hing
die Seele jedes Dings.
Und auch der Wind war anders groß,
der in die Fahnen sprang,
schlank wie ein Panther, atemlos
und taumelnd vom Trompetenstoß,
der lachend mit ihm rang.
Und manchmal griff der Wind hinab:
da ging ein Blutender, - ein Knab,
welcher die Trommel schlug;
er trug sie immer auf und ab
und trug sie wie sein Herz ins Grab
vor seinem toten Zug.
Da wurde mancher Berg geballt,
als war die Erde noch nicht alt
und baute sich erst auf;
bald stand das Eisen wie Basalt,
bald schwankte wie ein Abendwald
mit breiter steigender Gestalt
der großbewegte Hauf.
Es dampfte dumpf die Dunkelheit,
was dunkelte war nicht die Zeit, -
und alles wurde grau,
aber schon fiel ein neues Scheit,
und wieder ward die Flamme breit
und festlich angefacht.
Sie griffen an: in fremder Tracht
ein Schwarm phantastischer Provinzen;
wie alles Eisen plötzlich lacht:
von einem silberlichten Prinzen
erschimmerte die Abendschlacht.
Die Fahnen flatterten wie Freuden,
und Alle hatten königlich
in ihren Gesten ein Vergeuden, -
an fernen flammenden Gebäuden
entzündeten die Sterne sich...

Und Nacht war. Und die Schlacht trat sachte
zurück wie ein sehr müdes Meer,
das viele fremde Tote brachte,
und alle Toten waren schwer.
Vorsichtig ging das graue Pferd
(von großen Fäusten abgewehrt)
durch Männer, welche fremd verstarben,
und trat auf flaches, schwarzes Gras.
Der auf dem grauen Pferde saß,
sah unten auf den feuchten Farben
viel Silber wie zerschelltes Glas.
Sah Eisen welken, Helme trinken
und Schwerter stehn in Panzernaht,
sterbende Hände sah er winken
mit einem Fetzen von Brokat...
Und sah es nicht.

Und ritt dem Lärme
der Feldschlacht nach, als ob er schwärme,
mit seinen Wangen voller Wärme
und mit den Augen von Verliebten... 





Reis nas lendas
são como morros no crepúsculo. Abrem-
-se, àqueles que lhes adentram
as fraldas! E seus flancos
e a última franja de seus mantos
está coalhada de vidas e terras.
Nas mãos cheias de jóias,
jaz, fina e nua, a espada.

----------

Um jovem rei do norte foi
Na Ucrânia combater
Odiava a primavera e as madeixas das moças
Odiava as harpas, e o que diziam
Cavalgava um cavalo cinza
Cinzas eram seus olhos
E nunca tinha, de olho brilhando
Sentado aos pés de uma donzela.
Ninguém era sua bela
Nenhum beijo ele provara
E quando se zangava
então uma lunar pérola rasgava
duma cabeleira maravilhosa.
E quando a dor lhe possuía
então fazia uma doce dama
cujo anel havia tomado
mirar: morto seu prometido
por cem cães acossado.
...

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Gather

Some springs, apples bloom too soon.
The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick
to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs,
pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty
and quiet. No reason for the bees to come.

Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples
glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches,
the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit.

You could say, I have been foolish. You could say, I have been fooled.
You could say, Some years, there are apples.

- Rose McLarney

The Waste Land V - What the Thunder Said

  After the torchlight red on sweaty faces

After the frosty silence in the gardens

After the agony in stony places

The shouting and the crying

Prison and palace and reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience

Here is no water but only rock

Rock and no water and the sandy road

The road winding above among the mountains

Which are mountains of rock without water

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

There is not even solitude in the mountains

But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

From doors of mudcracked houses

                                      If there were water

   And no rock

   If there were rock

   And also water

   And water

   A spring

   A pool among the rock

   If there were the sound of water only

   Not the cicada

   And dry grass singing

   But sound of water over a rock

   Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees

   Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop

   But there is no water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded

I do not know whether a man or a woman

—But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

In this decayed hole among the mountains

In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing

Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel

There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.

It has no windows, and the door swings,

Dry bones can harm no one.

Only a cock stood on the rooftree

Co co rico co co rico

In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust

Bringing rain

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant.

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

Then spoke the thunder

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

                                    I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

                  Shantih     shantih     shantih


-T.S. Elliott