Thought

Isaac Pereira.2007.Elsewhere.

The child I was do not think landscapes like this.
He was part of it.

Isaac Pereira

Travel

Always travelling. That is how I had living my life.

Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966. She is the author of Domestic Work, which received the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and Native Guard, which received the Pulitzer Prize 2007 for Poetry.


THEORIES OF TIME AND SPACE

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return


"Theories of Time and Space" from Native Guard: Poems by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright © 2006 by Natasha Trethewey.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Pierre Baudelaire
April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867
One of the most influential French poets of the 19th century.


ENIVREZ-VOUS

Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c'est l'unique question. Pour ne pas sentir l'horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d'un palais, sur l'herbe verte d'un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l'ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue, demandez au vent, à la vague, à l'étoile, à l'oiseau, à l'horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est; et le vent, la vague, l'étoile, l'oiseau, l'horloge, vous répondront: «Il est l'heure de s'enivrer! Pour n'être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise!»

Le Spleen de Paris, Petits Poémes en prose

Translation:

It is essential to be drunk all the time.
That’s all: there’s no other problem.
If you do not want to feel the appalling weight of Time
which breaks your shoulders and bends you to the ground,
get drunk, and drunk again.
What with?
Wine, poetry, or being good, please yourself.
But get drunk.
And if now and then,
on the steps of a palace,
on the green grass of a ditch,
in the glum loneliness of your room,
you come to,
your drunken state abated or dissolved,
ask the wind,
ask the wave,
the star,
the bird,
the clock,
ask all that runs away,
all that groans,
all that wheels,
all that sings,
all that speaks,
what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will tell you:
‘It is time to get drunk!’
If you do not want to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk, always get drunk!
With wine, with poetry or with being good.
As you please.”

In Le Spleen de Paris, Petits Poémes en prose

Robert Frost

San Francisco, California, 26th March, 1874 - 29 th January, 1963. One of the most important Amercian Poets during the XXth century. He won four Pulitzer Prize's.

Robert Frost Foundation website


FIRE AND ICE

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

Elena Bono

RED FLOWERS

Red flowers
they grow high
at the mountain.
The wind move them
slowly
the wind touch them
wich remembers.

Elena Bono. Italy. 1921
Transated by Jorge de Sena

Chu Hsi

SUN OF SPRING

I leave the east breeze bathe im my face
The spring shines from the north to the south
With ten thousand red tones
and ten thousand blue tones

Chu Hsi (séc. IX)
Translation: Isaac Pereira from the portuguese Jorge Sousa Braga translation

Daniel Faria

Daniel Faria all works

I MUST BE THE LAST TIME...

I must be the last time
The final rain over the last animal in the grass
The corpse where the spider decides the circle.
I must be the last step in the stairs of Jacob
And the last dream in it
I must be to it last pain in the hip.
I must be the beggar at my door
And the house post for sale.
I must be the soil that receives me
And the tree that plants me.
In silence and slowly in the dark
I must be the eve. I must be the salt
Looking backwards.
Or the question at the time to leave.


Daniel Faria 1971-1999
In A Explicação das Árvores e de Outros Animais

Matsuo Bashô

I

There is no rice
but I have a flower
in the bowl

Matsuo Bashô, 1644-1694, Ueno, Japan

Rami Saari

© Isaac Pereira. Afternoon silence. Lisbon, 2006.

IN THE LITTLE HOUSE ON HALAFTA STREET

In the little house on Halafta street,
the evenings pass with ease.
Friends come and go,
and their taste is like the fragrance of myrrh.
The palm tree has a transparent rain-crown.
The roses almost break into the house.
On the evenings of this endless autumn
I’m always on the porch,
watching the lights of Talpiot opposite
and thinking
what stations you are in now
and how you disappeared the way life did.

© Rami Saari (b. 1963, Petah Tikva, Israel)
From “The Route of the Bold Pain”, 1997
Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden

Fernando Pessoa - Alberto Caeiro

Fernando Pessoa downtown in Lisbon.











Explanation about Alberto Caeiro birth in a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, and the original Poem II from the "Sheep Keeper".


Lisbon. 93 years ago inside house, over a piece of furniture…


THE SHEEP KEEPER

II

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And I’m very good at noticing things.
I’m capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.
I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born
Into a completely new world…

I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.

I have no philosophy, I have senses…
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.

To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think…

8-3-1914
© 1914, Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)
From: Poesia
Publisher: Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2001

© Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith
From: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin, New York, 2006

Pablo Neruda

After Nicanor Parra, Chile poetry returns. Chile should be considered a great place when we speak about spanish-american poetry. Today: Pablo Neruda, Nobel Prize in 1971.








Pablo Neruda, July 12th, 1904 – September 23th 1973. Pen name of Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto.

SCENT FEELING

Scent
of lilacs ...

Clear evenings of my remote infancy
that flowed as the course of the calmness waters

And later an agitated handkerchief at a distance.
Under a silk sky, a star that scintillates.

Nothing more. Tired feet in great trips.
And a pain, a pain that bites agains and become sharper.

...And in the distant bell towers, songs, penalties, anxieties
virgins who got pupils so candies.

Scent
of lilacs...

Pablo Neruda
Translated by: Isaac Pereira

Pierre Kemp

Pierre Kemp
1 December 1886, Maastricht - 21 July 1967, Maastricht, Nederland.

DREAMS

Certain nights I follow a yellow light
Until one blue door where it can be read: Dream.
Is not my hand who opens the door
Nor I am invited by a woman
To buy dreams, and exactly thus
They were always paid by me.
At night I was not in debt to anything.

Pierre Kemp
(1886-1967)

Translated by Isaac Pereira

Reinaldo Perez Só

THREE POEMS OF REINALDO PEREZ SÓ

I

The room
is
empty
of something I'm looking for
grandfather
like you

II

this is a chair
just a chair
on it
my father sat down
my brohers
all
my best friends
now
it is alone
with nobody
a chair

III

We who we dream
we feel the dream prettiest
we die early
because we are not dreams
nor birds
and the air weighs us
although
we come back in each night
to die of another dream

Reinaldo Perez Só (Venezuela)
From the book: To die of another dream
Translated by Isaac Pereira

After the rain

Pinhole. A Spring House.
© Isaac Pereira. 2006

After the rain
the trees sprouted from a green silence
and the birds sang, hidden in rock nests.
It had a weak light, it turns yellow, crepuscular,
a light that made days lengthen, that ennobles.
And in my small gardens, a scent of pansy and hydrangeas.

In that time, after the rain,
the clouds, as we,
they took a walk, whites, over the desert city.


Koi Hui-Sio
Translated by Isaac Pereira

Yun Sondo

© Isaac Pereira. Langkawi.Malaysia.2006

SEATED ALONE

Seated alone
with a cup in the hand
I observe
the distant mountains

Nor that if arrived
the love one
I would feel
bigger pleasure

Even they do not speak nor they laugh
I like much more
the moutains


Yun Sondo. Coreia.1587-1671
Translation: Isaac Pereira
(from a portuguese translation made by Yun Jung Im and Alberto Marsicano)

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

Vision

I had been sitting alone with books,
Till doubt was a black disease,
When I heard the cheerful shout of rooks
In the bare, prophetic trees.

Bare trees, prophetic of new birth,
You lift your branches clean and free
To be a beacon to the earth,
A flame of wrath for all to see.

And the rooks in the branches laugh and shout
To those that can hear and understand:
"Walk through the gloomy ways of doubt
With the torch of vision in your hand."

Aldous Huxley

Ana Paula Inácio

Portuguese poet. 1966

I’D LIKE YOU TO GO WITH ME

i’d like you to go with me
through life
like a sail
that would discover for me the world
but i’m on the uncertain side
where the wind pounds
and i can only teach you
the names of trees
whose fruit will be plucked in another season
where the trains scatter
anguished whistles

© Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith
© 2000, Ana Paula Inácio
From: Vago Pressentimento Azul por Cima
Publisher: Ilhas, Oporto, 2000

Chenjerai Hove

Zimbabwe,February 9, 1956. Other biography data

A WAR-TORN WIFE

This war!
I am tired
of a husband who never sleeps
guarding the home or on call-up,
never sleeping!

Maybe inside him he says
‘I am tired of a wife
who never dies
so I could stop guarding’.

© 1982, Chenjerai Hove
From: Up In Arms
Publisher: Zimbabwe Publishing House, Harare, 1982

Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky. Russian Poet, born in Leningrad, today S. Petersburg, on May, 24th 1940. Died in New York, on January 28th 1996. Nobel Prize in1987. He wrote in Russian language and some years later in English. In 1964 was condemned in five years to a field of forced work by the soviet state. Then he went on exile to the US and had become an American citizen in 1977.


TO MY DAUGHTER

Give me another life, and I'll be singing
in Caffè Rafaella. Or simply sitting
there. Or standing there, as furniture in the corner,
in case that life is a bit less generous than the former.

Yet partly because no century from now on will ever manage
without caffeine or jazz. I'll sustain this damage,
and through my cracks and pores, varnish and dust all over,
observe you, in twenty years, in your full flower.

On the whole, bear in mind that I'll be around. Or rather,
that an inanimate object might be your father,
especially if the objects are older than you, or larger.
So keep an eye on them always, for they no doubt will judge you.

Love those things anyway, encounter or no encounter.
Besides, you may still remember a silhouette, a contour,
while I'll lose even that, along with the other luggage.
Hence, these somewhat wooden lines in our common language.

Joseph Brodsky

So Forth (1984)

Buland Al-Haydari

A small piece of sand inside the great respect that the free citizen must give to the Great Iraqi People.

Buland Al-Haydari. Iraq (1926-1996)










THE POSTMAN

What do you want postman?
I am far away from the world
with no doubt you are mistaken...
since there is nothing new
that the world can bring to this fugitive.
What was it
is what is still the same:
Dream
or buried
or evoke
until the people still has their festives
and there funerals together feast with feast
the eyes unburied in their minds
another bone to a new hunger.
China still has the wall
a whipe myth and a repeated destiny
the Earth still has its' Sísifo
and a stone that does not know what it wants.

Postman
with no doubt you are mistaken...
since nothing is new
return to the road
since the road so many times has brought you.
And what we want?


Translated by Isaac Pereira

César Vallejo

Today a Poet from Peru. A Poet from the World.
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza
Santiago de Chuco, an Andes village, March 16, 1892
Paris, April 15, 1938






BLACK STONE ON TOP OF A WHITE STONE

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

It shall be a Thursday, because today, Thursday
As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil. Never like today have I turned,
And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.

César Vallejo is dead. They struck him,
All of them, though he did nothing to them,
They hit him hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,
The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain, and the roads...

César Vallejo
translated by Thomas Merton

Stanley Kunitz

American poet Stanley Kunitz, Worcester, Massachusetts
July 29, 1905 – May 14, 2006

AN OLD CRACKED TUNE

My name is Solomon Levi,
the desert is my home,
my mother's breast was thorny,
and father I had none.

The sands whispered, Be separate,
the stones taught me, Be hard.
I dance, for the joy of surviving,
on the edge of the road.

Stanley Kunitz

José Afonso

Aveiro, August 2, 1929 - Setúbal,February 23, 1987

LOVE DOES NOT DECEIVE ME

Love does not deceive me
With his slightness
If of a old flame
badly lives, bitterness

From one black spot
From a cold rock
Which love not delivery
In the empty night?

And the voices embark
In a afflict silence
The more they separate
More listened is the shout

To the waters surface
Sailor night
comes slowly
For my side

In new fields
Near of a wall tree
born red flowers
For the Spring

Thus you know
Sister lark
Say me if you wait
For the rising day

José Afonso
Translated by Isaac Pereira

Nicanor Parra

Chilean poet Nicanor Parra: the "antipoet"
San Fabián de Alico
September 5, 1914

THE VICES OF THE MODERN WORLD

Modern delinquents
Are authorized to convene daily in parks and gardens.
Equipped with powerful binoculars and pocket watches
They break into kiosks favored by death
And install their laboratories among the rosebushes in full flower.
From there they direct the photographers and beggars that roam the neighborhood
Trying to raise a small temple to misery
And, if they get a chance, having some woebegone shoeshine boy.
The cowed police run from these monsters
Making for the middle of town
Where the great year's end fires are breaking out
And a hooded hero is robbing two nuns at gun point.

The vices of the modern world:
The motor car and the movies,
Racial discrimination,
The extermination of the Indian,
The manipulations of high finance,
The catastrophe of the aged,
The clandestine white-slave trade carried on by international sodomites,
Self-advertisement and gluttony,
Expensive funerals,
Personal friends of His Excellency,
The elevation of folklore to a spiritual category,
The abuse of soporifics and philosophy,
The softening-up of men favored by fortune,
Autoeroticism and sexual cruelty,
The exaltation of the study of dreams and the subconscious to the detriment of common sense,
The exaggerated faith in serums and vaccines,
The deification of the phallus,
The international spread-legs policy patronized by the reactionary press,
The unbounded lust for power and money,
The gold rush,
The fatal dollar dance,
Speculation and abortion,
The destruction of idols,
Overdevelopment of dietetics and pedagogical psychology,
The vices of dancing, of the cigarette, of games of chance,
The drops of blood that are often found on the sheets of newlyweds,
The madness for the sea,
Agoraphobia and claustrophobia,
The disintegration of the atom,
The gory humor of the theory of relativity,
The frenzy to return to the womb,
The cult of the exotic,
Airplane accidents,
Incinerations, mass purges, retention of passports,
All this just because,
To produce vertigo,
Dream-analysis,
And the spread of radiomania.

As has been demonstrated
The modern world is composed of artificial flowers
Grown under bell jars like death,
It is made of movie stars
And blood-smeared boxers fighting by moonlight
And nightingale-men controlling the economic lives of the nations
With certain easily explained devices;
Usually they are dressed in black like precursors of autumn
And eat roots and wild herbs.
Meanwhile the wise, gnawed by rats,
Rot in the crypts of cathedrals
And souls with the slightest nobility are relentlessly persecuted by the police.

The modern world is an enormous sewer,
The chic restaurants are stuffed with digesting corpses
And birds flying dangerously low.
That's not all: the hospitals are full of impostors,
To say nothing of those heirs of the spirit who found colonies in the anus of each new surgical case.

Modern industrialists occasionally suffer from the effects of the poisoned atmosphere.
They are stricken at their sewing machines by the terrifying sleeping sickness
Which eventually turns them into angels, of a sort.
They deny the existence of the physical world
And brag about being poor children of the grave.
And yet the world has always been like this.
Truth, like beauty, is neither created nor lost
And poetry is in things themselves or is merely a mirage of the spirit.
I admit that a well-planned earthquake
Can wipe out a city rich in traditions in a matter of seconds,
And that a meticulous aerial bombardment
Smashes trees, horses, thrones, music,
But what does it matter
If, while the world's greatest ballerina
Is dying, poor and abandoned, in a village in southern France,
Spring restores to man a few of the vanished flowers.

What I say is, let's try to be happy, sucking on the miserable human rib.
Let's extract from it the restorative liquid,
Each one following his personal inclinations.
Let's cling to this divine table scrap!
Panting and trembling,
Let's suck those lips that drive us wild.
The lot is cast.
Let's breathe in this enervating and destructive perfume
And for one more day live the life of the elect.
Out of his armpits man extracts the wax he needs to mold the faces of his idols
And out of woman's sex the straw and the mud for his temples.
Therefore
I grow a louse on my tie
And smile at the imbeciles descending from the trees.

translated by W.S. Merwin

In Antipoems: New and Selected (edited by David Unger), New York, New Directions, 1985

Vinicius de Moraes

ASH WEDNESDAY MARCH

Our carnival's at the end
Nobody hears to sing the songs
Nobody's playing with happiness
And inside all hearts
What remains is home sicknesses and leached ashes

At the streets what's seen
People who does not see themselves
Does not smile
Does not kiss and hugh each other
And leave walking
Without dance and without sing love songs.

However is necessary to sing
More than never is necessary to sing
Is necessary to sing and cheer the city

The people sadness
Any day goes to finish
Everybody goes to smile
The hope came back
Is the people who dances
Happy for the life, happy to sing
Because there are many blue things
And we have so great light promises
As much love to love of that people nor know

How I wish to live for see
And to play other carnivals
With the beauty of the old carnivals
So pretty carnival marches
And people singing his song of peace
His song of peace

Vinicius de Moraes
Complete works: "Cancioneiro"

Translation: IP

Salvatore Quasimodo

AND SUDDENLY IS EVENING

Everyone stays alone at the world heart,
pierced by a sun beam,
and suddenly is evening.


Salvatore Quasimodo, Sicily, Italy
1901, Modica - Ragusa - 1960 Naples
1959 Nobel Prize.
Translated by IP

Jacques Prévert

© Robert Doisneau
Jacque Prévert, Paris 1955

FREE DISTRICT

I put my cap in the cage
and I left with the bird on the head
Then
one does not greet any more
asked the commander
No
No one does not greet any more
the bird answered
Ah Good
excuse me I believed that one greeted
the commander said
You are excused everyone can be mistaken
said the bird.

Jacques Prévert,french poet
From the book: Paroles
Translated by: IP

Bai Juyi

Spring Beginning

The snow melts, days are each time hotter,
the ice disappears, sun rays flood the land,
slowly the buds gain force.
Spring does not only undo the frost white of my hair.

Bai Juyi (China. 772-846)

Spring

© Isaac Pereira. Macau 2006.Tou Fa. Kam Kat.

Tan Fong Lou

On the way which illuminates the wind - Tan Fong Lou - I carried a tree
It rained. The wind blew.
Before the night comes, it would come the Spring.

I knew.
To the cold,I carried a tree on the way which illuminates the wind.

Isaac Pereira
February 2007

Six Haiku

I

Rain is cold.
To the top of the mountain
the Spring arrives.

II

Frozen night.
The fire crack blows
in the river waters.

III

At the home door
to enter the richness:
- mandarin oranges.

IV

A new moon.
Incense and fire crackers.
The children play.

V

Tou Fa flowers:
- A Spring tree
inside home.

VI

This day went down.
Inside the wind silence,
a bird flies.

Koi Hui Sio

Macau, 2004

About Youth – Passing clouds

© Isaac Pereira. South China Sea. 2001

About Youth – Passing clouds

Beaches, coffees, apartments,
places where, for the last time, they had touched the skin.

One day, with the luggage for opening,
one of the lovers will return to the city ruins,
and if not return,
in one another shelter port ,
ever a trip finishes,
will remember the brief summer wind,
the window of the blue room
where, as in the transparent looks screen.
it had tears and some smiles.

Isaac Pereira
01.1999

Inger Christensen

IF I AM…

If I am
alone in the snow
is obvious
that I am a clock

in another way how could
eternity slide

Inger Christensen -1935, Vejle. Eastern coast of Jutland - Denmark
Translated by Isaac Pereira

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht - Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht
February 10, 1898 – August 14, 1956
German socialist dramatist, stage director, and poet of the 20th century.

RADIO POEM

You little box, held to me escaping
So that your valves should not break
Carried from house to house to ship from sail to train,
So that my enemies might go on talking to me,
Near my bed, to my pain
The last thing at night, the first thing in the morning,
Of their victories and of my cares,
Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.

Bertolt Brecht

Les Murray

Leslie Allan Murray.
17 October 1938
An Australian poet.









Les Murray Website

THE MEANING OF EXISTENCE

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

Les Murray

In
Poems the Size of Photographs, 2002

Petronio

Another classic.

HUMAN COMEDY

As long as is expedient, the name of friendship lives,
Just as in dicing, Fortune smiles or lowers;
When good luck beckons, then your friend his gleeful service gives
But basely flies when ruin o'er you towers.
The strollers act their farces upon the stage, each one his part,

The father, son, the rich man, all are here,
But soon the page is turned upon the comic actor's art,
The masque is dropped, the make-ups disappear.

Petronio. 1st. Cent. Satyricon, 80
Translation by W. C. Firebaugh

José Agostinho Baptista

© Isaac Pereira. Trás-os-montes. Portugal.2006

José Agostinho Baptista Homepage

TWILIGHT

Burn everything, set me on fire, more and more.
Kiss the vast deserts of my combustion.
Do not say anything.
In the twilight,lead me to the fold,
you make to sound the sheep bells and sing near the wind
mill.

José Agostinho Baptista. Portuguese poet.
Translation: Isaac Pereira
From the book "Quatro luas", 2006.
Publisher: Assírio & Alvim

Juan Ramón Jimenez

Juan Ramón Jimenez, Spanish poet. Nobel Prize in 1956.
Moguer, Huelva, south of Andaluzia. 23.12.1881
Santurce, Puerto Rico, 29.12.1958

WINTER SONG

They sing. They sing.
Where the birds sing, the birds that sing?

It rained. Still the branches
are without new leaves. They sing. The birds
sing. Where sing,
the birds that sing?

I do not have imprisoned birds.
It does not have boys for sell them. They sing.
The valley is far. Nothing...

I do not know where sing
the birds - they sing, they sing -,
the birds that sing.


Juan Ramón Jimenez
Translated by: IP

Langston Hughes

© Gordon Parks
Langston Hughes, Chicago
1941

Langston Hughes
February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967
American poet.


POEM
For the portrait of an African boy after the manner of Gauguin

All the tom-toms of the jungles beat in my blood,
And all the wild hot moons of the jungles shine in my soul.
I am afraid of this civilization-
So hard,
So strong,
So cold.

Langston Hughes, 1965

Ingeborg Bachmann

June 25, 1926 Klagenfurt, Austria - October 17, 1973 Rome, Italy

Poet, writer,essay writer from Austria. Ingeborg Bachmann work crosses with Paul Celan or Walter Benjamin. Poetic language as a iluminate chance, against world horror. She were member of the post-war literature group named Gruppe 47 Paul Celan and Gunter Grass are samples of the group members.
The prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, awarded yearly in Klagenfurt, is named after her death.

SHADOWS ROSES SHADOWS

Under a strange sky
shadows roses
shadows
in a strange land
between roses and shadows
in a strange water
my shadow


Ingeborg Bachmann, Bigger Ursa Invocation
Translation: IP

Nima Yoshij

Nima Yoshij,The Father of modern Persian poetry
(Portrait by: Hadi Shafaieh)

IT IS NIGHT

A night of deep darkness.
On a branch of the old fig tree
A frog croaks without cease,
Predicting a storm, a deluge,
and I am drowned in fear.

It is night,

And with night the world seems
like a corpse in the grave;
And in fear I say to myself:
"What if torrential rain falls everywhere?"
"What if the rain does not stop
until the earth sinks into the water
like a small boat?"

In this night of awful darkness

Who can say in what state we will be
when dawn breaks?
Will the morning light make
the frightening face of the storm
disappear?


Nima Yoshij(1896 - 1960),Iran.

More information about Nima Yoshij Life and Works:
http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/nyoshij/nima_yoshij.php

Homero Aridjis

Today, another latino-american poet, but with greek roots.













IT HAS BEINGS...

It has beings that are more image than substance
more look of that body

so incorporeal we love them
that we almost do not want to touch them with words

since the childhood we search them
more in the dream that in the meat

and always in the threshold of the lips
the morning light seems to say them


Homero Aridjis (Contepec, Michoacán, Mexico,1940)
Translated by José Bento

Vinicius de Moraes

Vinicius de Moraes, 1960

Second month of this daily notes and other poetic adventures. I wish to share another Great Poet. After Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a Poet, also from Brazil and from the World: Vinicius de Moraes.
Another information at "Poetry and Music" link, to the official Vinicius de Moraes website.

POETIC

On morning I become gloomy
At noon I delay
At afternoon I become dark
At night I am on fire.

The west the death
Against who am I living
At the captive south
East is my north.

Others will count
Step by step:
I will die yesterday.

I will born tomorrow
I walk where it has space:
– My time is when.

Vinicius de Moraes, Rio de Janeiro,1913-1980.

New York, 1950

Dialogue

© Isaac Pereira
Lisboa, Monsanto. 2007

In the edge of the road, a wild cherry tree:

- Why you walk without seeing me,
slave of Ignorance?
How your eyes are useful?
Withholds! My traveller!

- Cannot, master. I am the one who suppose to have seen everything already.

Koi Hui Sio

A man...

©Isaac Pereira
Cascais, Guincho. 2006

A man walks.
He sights the sea, mountains,
reptiles over the land.

Koi Hui Sio

Sylvia Plath

I WANT, I WANT

Open-mouthed, the baby god
Immense, bald, though baby-headed,
Cried out for the mother's dug.
The dry volcanoes cracked and split,

Sand abraded the milkless lip.
Cried then for the father's blood
Who set wasp, wolf and shark to work,
Engineered the gannet's beak.

Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch
Raised his men of skin and bone,
Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,
Thorns on the bloody rose-stem.

Sylvia Plath, E.U.A. (1932-1963)

Eugéne Guillevic

French poet. Born in Bretagne - Carnac, Morbihan, 5 th August, 1907. One of the majors poets in the second half of XX century. In 1976 Guillevic won the Grand Prix de Poetry "Le grand Prix de poésie de l'Académie française". In 1984 he received the "Grand Prix national de poésie". He died in Paris in 1997.

AND WE LEAVE...

And we leave,

Baptizing the future
With the last tears.


Author:Eugène Guillevic, Sphère(1963)
Translation: David Mourão Ferreira

Luís Vaz de Camões

© Isaac Pereira
Luís Vaz de Camões tumb at Jerónimos Monastery. Lisbon.

SINCE MY EYES DON´T TIRE OF WEEPING

Since my eyes don’t tire of weeping
sorrows that don’t tire of weighing on me,
since nothing softens the fire I burn in
for one whose heart I could never soften,

let blind Love be my tireless guide
to lands I don’t know my way out of,
and let the whole world keep on listening
as long as my weak voice doesn’t fail.

And if there’s pity in hills, rivers
and valleys, or if there’s Love in beasts,
birds, plants, stones and streams,

let them hear my long tale of troubles
and use my sorrow to cure their own,
since greater griefs can cure smaller ones.


© Luís Vaz de Camões (1524/5 -1580)
From: Rimas
Publisher: Almedina, Coimbra, 1994
© Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith

Friedrich Nietzsche

From Trick, Morning and Revenge, by Friedrich Nietzsche. In the last day of this first month. Just for convention. Just a question: Should I go ahead, with this blog? Does someone read it?

WISDOM OF THE WORLD

Do not stay in a plain land.
Do not go up very high.
The most beautiful look over the world
Is at the half hillside.

JUDGMENTS OF THE TIRED MEN

All the depleted ones curse the sun;
For them the value of the trees is... in the shade!

The Merry Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, Germany, 1844-1900
Translated by IP

Mzi Mahola

Today, finally in this blog, a poem from Africa.

HOUSE OF THE POOR

When I was a little boy
I never questioned why
A solitary path
Led from a poor man’s hut.

Why it zigzagged
Like the trail of a wounded beast.

Now that I’m a burdened man
I know why the rich are troubled
When we grumble.

© 2000, Mzi Mahola, South Africa
From:When rains come
Publisher: Carapace Poets, an imprint of Snailpress, South Africa

Dylan Thomas

Copyright © Lee Miller Archives

All about Dylan Thomas at:
http://www.dylanthomas.com

WAS THERE A TIME

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
There was a time they could cry over books,
But time has set its maggot on their track.
Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
What's never known is safest in this life.
Under the skysigns they who have no arms
Have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

Dylan Thomas.
Swansea, Wales, 27 th October 1914 – New York, 9th November, 1953

Kalidasa

DESIRE...

Desire push her to the lover
But the fear stops her for a while
She looks like the silk from a flag
Sometimes leaves sometimes steal from the wind.

Kalidasa, Índia. V cent.
Translated by IP

Anonymous II

NIGHT VISIT

Move away the bamboo curtain,
my love;
come and lean on me.
If my mother listen,
I will say:"It was only the wind".

Anonymous, VIII Century (Japan)
Tranlated by Isaac Pereira

Winter Haiku

Covide. North of portugal. By Isaac Pereira

Naked trees.
White,the new moon
in a deeply blue.

Koi Hui Sio

Anonymous I

PEAR SYRUP, WINE SYRUP

Your body is like a vase,
Where the wine boils, sweet like sugar.

In it is profoundly, the flavoured clove,
The spice and terrestrial cinnamom,
The acid lemon.

Lightly, a knife remove the fruits skin that the fingers touch
And deposit them in the vase. A fire vase.

I close my eyes.
The kitchen is an aroma of nectar and grapes.

While the wood spoon stirs,
I wait for the seed, the lips, the drunkness jelly.
And I reduce inside the vase,
The bubbling liquids

A ruby syrup like the pears! Matured!
Chlep! Chlep!

Anonymous.
Translated by IP

Issa Kobayashi

Snowy night.
It has people that they walk
in silence.

Winter haiku. Solitude.

For more information about Issa Kobayashi visit:

http://haikuguy.com/issa/index.html

Arthur Rimbaud

Again the winter.
Rimbaud, a young poet with 16 years old, describes us, a trip inside a coach.

DREAM FOR THE WINTER

To Her.

In the winter we shall go in a small pink coach
With blue cushions
We will be well. A nest of insane kisses rests
In each soft corner.

You will close your eyes. Not to see, by the glassware
Ugly face shades of the night,
Those aggressive monstrosities, mob
Of black demons and of the black wolves.

After that, you will feel the face scratched...
A small kiss, like an insane spider,
Will run on you for the neck...

And you will say to me: "Seek!", by inclining the head
-And we will take time to find this little animal
-Who travels too much…

Inside a coach . October, 7th 1870.

Translated by IP

IN JANUARY

Shadows Playing. A morning at Orsay Museum,Paris. May,2005.
Photography by Isaac Pereira.

To my mother...

IN JANUARY

In January, cats stand still in the sun
Between the ruins of abandoned houses.
Cold goes through the nostrils
And comes out from the mouth in fumes of surprise.

It is the time and latitude of sweet sleep and vegetal
Of childish trees of imagination, of the blue, lilies and pink hydrangeas ….
And there are buds in seedbeds without name,
Nest dug in the interior of the moss, in the uterus of the earth.
Certain that they will be red until death,
will be one day, to awake vernal of hands, of fingers,
of our cold and worm hands like lips of blue fire.

Return to the old house
Attached to the granite rain,
To a gale of naked tree.
In the streets where the margins are current of rivers,
The gutters are cataracts,
The estuary where hides the weight of the world.
The unknown nightmares.

But today You believe. Today I had a dream. A dream like everyone.
It was an oriental flower market.
I greeted the sellers that I acquainted in days that were not dreams.
The stalls were yellow, were white.
Oh I may have found you, maybe lost in those petals.
Leaving a dream to a cold reality.
In January, cats wonder like men in abandoned city,
Invisible, giving up underneath the viaducts
Without words, making fire, cold, do not dance.
As if they snarl softly.

In January, I am not yet tired,
Extend my legs in hot water of the night
And, like a distant grumble, hearing you sing:

DOBA, DOBA, DOBADOIRA…*

I do not fall asleep alone.

* Portuguese folk song.

Ricardo Reis. Fernando Pessoa

Photo by Isaac Pereira. Winter, 2006.

STARING AT THE DISTANCE, MOUNTAINS...

Staring at the distance, mountains with snow and sun,
But the quiet cold is soft already
Which smooths and sharps
The darts of the high sun.

Today,Neera, does not hide us.
Nothing is missing, because we are nothing.
We await nothing
And we freeze at the sun.

But as it is,enjoy the moment,
Festives with enjoyment softly,
And to wait for death
To whom is known.

16-6-1914

Ricardo Reis, Odes and Other Poems.
Assírio e Alvim Publishers.

Winter

To my father...

I

Cold, in the moonlight,
the grapevine shadow,
touch the stone.

II

Remained the branches,
a song of a bird,
frozen wires.

III

Someone forgot it:
it hangs in the naked branches
an old grapes cluster.

IV

I open the window:
All gray! Only snow!
A blackbird in the branch!

V

A frost morning:
Air of burnt vineyard
in the old ones fire.

Koi Hui-Sio
Translated by IP

Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão

Wall concret.Icarus at the Pireo harbour, Athens. August,1991.
By Isaac Pereira.
Assembly with a Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão picture.

EPÍSTLE TO DEDALUS

Why you gave to your son plumage wax wings
if the powerfull sun at the sky would undo them?
It did not hear me, so far, however I thought I said:
all the sons are Icarus, who will die in the sea.
Later they return, prodigal, to the love between the blood
of what they were and of what they are now, sons of the sons.

Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, in Epístolas e Memorandos, 1996
Translated by IP

One thought. Eduardo Lourenço, portuguese thinker:

Fiama is “a kind of a silence shell, which reflects all of the world pains and joys. (...) But now we will have enough time to read from her, how is usual in Portugal, where we awake only with the dead in our arms" and "if there is a heaven for the poets as we said that exists for the children when they die, for her innocence, Fiama, who had this wonderful flare name, will have a certain place in it."

Eduardo Lourenço is the preface author of “Obra Breve”, book that congregates the completely Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão poetry. (Assírio e Alvim, 2006).