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