Calmly we walk through this April's day

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn . . .)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn. 

Delmore Schwartz

bodies

Cast the pearls aside of a simple life of need
Come into my life forever
The crumbled cities stand as known
Of the sights that you have been shown
Of the hurt you call your own

Love is suicide

The empty bodies stand at rest
Casualties of their own flesh
Afflicted by their dispossession
But nobody's ever knew
No bodies
Nobody's felt like you
No bodies

Love is suicide

Now we drive the night to the ironies of peace
You can't help deny forever
The tragedies reside in you
The secret sights hide in you
The lonely nights divide you in two
All my blisters now revealed
In the darkness of my dreams
In the spaces in between us
But nobody's ever knew
No bodies
Nobody's felt like you
No bodies

Love is suicide

Smashing Pumpkins

Mário de Sá-Carneiro

(Se a minha alma fosse uma Princesa nua
E debochada e linda...)

Lisboa, 1913.

Waiting

When I am alone I am happy. 
The air is cool. The sky is 
flecked and splashed and wound 
with color. The crimson phalloi 
of the sassafras leaves 
hang crowded before me 
in shoals on the heavy branches. 
When I reach my doorstep 
I am greeted by the happy shrieks of my children 
and my heart sinks. I am crushed. 

Are not my children as dear to me 
as falling leaves or 
must one become stupid 
to grow older? 
It seems much as if Sorrow 
had tripped up my heels. 
Let us see, let us see! 
What did I plan to say to her 
when it should happen to me 
as it has happened now? 

William Carlos Williams

cinzas

Carnaval de rua no Rio de 1960. Foto de Marcel Gautherot. Acervo do IMS.

Heima

Er völlur grær og vetur flýr 
og vermir sólin grund 
Kem ég heim og hitti þig 
verð hjá þér alla stund

Við byggjum saman bæ í sveit 
sem blasir móti sól 
Þar ungu lífi landið mitt 
mun ljá og veita skjól 

Sól slær sifri á voga 
sjáðu jökulinn loga 
Allt er bjart fyrir okkur tveim 
Því ég er kominn heim

Að ferðalokum finn ég þig 
sem mér fagnar höndum tveim 
Ég er kominn heim 
já ég er kominn heim

my punch-drunk love

a saudade descreve um arco

Song

Again I see your slow mouth
(The sea flows to meet it in the night)
And the mare of your loins
Hurling you in agony
Into my singing arms,
And a sleep retrieving you
To coloured things and new deaths.

And the cruel solitude
That every lover finds within himself,
Now an endless grave,
Divides me from you for ever.

Dear one, distant as in a mirror...

Giuseppe Ungaretti in Selected Poems, Penguin, 1971.

Love

Two thousand cigarettes.
A hundred miles
from wall to wall.
An eternity and a half of vigils
blanker than snow.


Tons of words
old as the tracks
of a platypus in the sand.


A hundred books we didn't write.
A hundred pyramids we didn't build.


Sweepings.
Dust.


Bitter
as the beginning of the world.


Believe me when I say
it was beautiful.


Miroslav Holub
Selected Poems / Penguin Modern European Poets, 1967.