No silêncio…

“I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d;
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

So they show their relations to me, and I accept them;
They bring me tokens of myself—they evince them plainly in their possession.”

Walt Whitman, in «Song of Myself»

“golden silence…” por António J. S.

Nevermore

«Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,» I shrieked, upstarting —
«Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!— quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!»

Quoth the Raven, «Nevermore.»

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted — nevermore!

Retirado de «The Raven», Edgar Allan Poe

Michael Kountouris, «Politicalcartoons.com»

Coisas da noite…

Ouvir a noite imensa, mais imensa sem ela.
E o verso cai na alma como no pasto o orvalho.
Importa lá que o meu amor não pudesse guardá-la.
A noite está estrelada e ela não está comigo.

Pablo Neruda, retirado de «Posso escrever os versos mais tristes»

Maria Bethânia por Eduardo Baptistão

Maria Bethânia, in «Onde Estará o Meu Amor»

We Spent The 4th Of July In Bed

Afinal, quantas pessoas se interessam pela cultura?, se põem o problema da vida?, do homem?, se põem a interrogação sobre o que nos rodeia? É um erro tocante o imaginar-se que as pessoas cultivadas se interessam pela cultura. A cultura não vem nos livros, nem nos cursos, nem nas salas de conferências, espectáculos, exposições com uísque ou a seco. A cultura é um problema que tem que ver com os nossos cromossomas e tem a dimensão secreta, oculta, privada, íntima, de uma vivência sagrada.

Vergílio Ferreira, in «Conta-Corrente 3»

Uma das muitas sessões «únicas» do Def Poetry Jam… Suheir Hammad, uma senhora que vale a pena seguir. Ainda bem que existe o YouTube.

Halfway down the stairs

Halfway down the stairs
Is a stair where I sit:
There isn’t any other stair quite like it.
I’m not at the bottom,
I’m not at the top:
So this is the stair where I always stop.
Halfway up the stairs
Isn’t up, and isn’t down.
It isn’t in the nursery, it isn’t in the town:
And all sorts of funny thoughts
Run round my head:
«It isn’t really anywhere! It’s somewhere else instead!»

Alan Alexander Milne (1882-1956)

Dizem que é época de balanços, de nomear o pior e o melhor (e de muita coisa que não me estou a lembrar muito bem). Não me apetece. Apenas digo que há sempre aqueles que ficam, não interessa o tempo que passou ou que ainda poderá passar, onde estão ou poderão vir a estar. Estão sempre aqui.

E um bom 2008 para todos; afinal até merecemos. Amanhã o Mundo continua.

The Sound of the Sea

«The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,
And round the pebbly beaches far and wide
I heard the first wave of the rising tide
Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;
A voice out of the silence of the deep,
A sound mysteriously multiplied
As of a cataract from the mountain’s side,
Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep.
So comes to us at times, from the unknown
And inaccessible solitudes of being,
The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul;
And inspirations, that we deem our own,
Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing
Of things beyond our reason or control.»

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Psychoed

As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who was not there,
he wasn’t there again today,
I wish that man would go away.

Hughes Mearns (1875-1965), «The Psychoed»

Foi escrito para ser uma rima para crianças e está referenciado no «The New Oxford Book of Children’s Verse» com o título de «The Little Man». Contudo, este pequenos poema também foi editado com títulos alternativos: «Antigonish», na antologia de ficção científica «World in Small», e «The Psychoed».

O poema do Sr. Mearns sempre foi fonte de inspiração para muitos e de «The Psychoed» existem várias versões e pequenas variações; uma delas foi publicada pela «MAD Magazine» durante o Church Committee em 1975:

There was a man upon the stair
When I looked back, he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today
I think he’s from the CIA.

A última conhecida é em forma de cartoon e pertence ao Sr. Ed Hall.

Ed Hall, «Baker County Press»

Torga

Agora que o silêncio é um mar sem ondas,
E que nele posso navegar sem rumo,
Não respondas
Às urgentes perguntas
Que te fiz.
Deixa-me ser feliz
Assim,
Já tão longe de ti como de mim.

Perde-se a vida a desejá-la tanto.
Só soubemos sofrer, enquanto
O nosso amor
Durou.
Mas o tempo passou,
Há calmaria…
Não perturbes a paz que me foi dada.
Ouvir de novo a tua voz seria
Matar a sede com água salgada.

Miguel Torga, «Súplica»

Bandeira, «Diário de Notícias»

The Dead Man Walking

And if when I died fully
I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing
I am to-day,

Yet is it that, though whiling
The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling,
I live not now.

Retirado de «The Dead Man Walking», in «Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses» (1909) de Thomas Hardy.

O poema de Hardy daria origem à expressão Dead man walking, dead man walking here usada pelos guardas prisionais americanos quando escoltam um prisioneiro à ala da morte (Death Row) onde irão esperar pelo dia da execução. E ao impressionante cartoon do Sr. Paul Conrad sobre os militares no Iraque.

Paul Conrad, «Tribune Media Services»

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

W.B. Yeats

Well Oiled
Matt Dixon

A Lua…

…que pela noite carrega a cidade adormecida e os sonhos nela contida…

The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;
She shines on thieves on the garden wall,
On streets and fields and harbour quays,
And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.

The squalling cat and the squeaking mouse,
The howling dog by the door of the house,
The bat that lies in bed at noon,
All love to be out by the light of the moon.

But all of the things that belong to the day,
Cuddle to sleep to be out of her way;
And flowers and children close their eyes
Till up in the morning the sun shall arise.

«The Moon», Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), in «A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods» (1913)

Angel Boligan, «El Universal»

I Dream’d in a Dream

I DREAM’D in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth;
I dream’d that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love—it led the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.

Walt Whitman, in «Leaves of Grass»

City Escape, by Rozefire

No Second Troy

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the lithe streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), «Responsibilities and Other Poems» (1916)

Silêncio…

Em dias de tristeza
rendi-me ao riso.
E, já rendido
encontrei-me sombrio.

Viktor Dyk (1877-1931)

Sleep walking, Niux

Descartes

Sou o único homem na Terra e talvez não haja nem Terra nem homem.
Talvez um Deus me engane.
Talvez um Deus me tenha condenado ao tempo, essa longa ilusão.
Sonho a Lua e sonho os meus olhos que a vêem.
Sonhei a noite e a manhã do primeiro dia.
Sonhei Cartago e as legiões que devastaram Cartago.
Sonhei Virgílio.
Sonhei a Colina Gólgota e os tormentos de Roma.
Sonhei a geometria.
Sonhei o ponto, a linha, o plano e o volume.
Sonhei o amarelo, o vermelho e o azul.
Sonhei os mapas e os reinos e a morte ao amanhecer.
Sonhei a minha infância enferma.
Sonhei a dor inconcebível.
Sonhei a minha espada.
Sonhei Isabel da Boémia.
Sonhei a dúvida e a certeza.
Sonhei o dia de ontem.
Mas talvez não tenha havido ontem, talvez eu não tenha nascido.
Eu sonho, quem sabe, ter sonhado.

Sinto um pouco de frio, algum temor.
No Danúbio é noite.
Continuarei sonhando Descartes e a fé de seus pais.

Jorge Luis Borges, in ‘La Cifra’ (1981)

A Dream

In visions of the dark night
I have dreamed of joy departed-
But a waking dream of life and light
Hath left me broken-hearted.

Ah! what is not a dream by day
To him whose eyes are cast
On things around him with a ray
Turned back upon the past?

That holy dream- that holy dream,
While all the world were chiding,
Hath cheered me as a lovely beam
A lonely spirit guiding.

What though that light, thro’ storm and night,
So trembled from afar-
What could there be more purely bright
In Truth’s day-star?

«A Dream», Edgar Allan Poe (1827)

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh,
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference

Robert Frost (1874–1963), in «Mountain Interval», 1916