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Song 2

Paisagem para Anna Akhmátova

O corpo, ainda corpo,

sabe de cor
a dor. Dizer adeus,
carpir, esconder,
bater palavras contra o muro.
Ruas de São Petersburgo
sob a neblina – o corpo
sabe de cor
onde se morre.
Mas, por entre o estridor
de soldados e funcionários,
cava uma saída:
o próximo poema
(promessa de delicadeza e silêncio)
– ouve cantar uma cereja. 

 

Eucanaã Ferraz

Quem disse que a poesia é apenas agreste avena?

Quem disse que a poesia é apenas
agreste avena?
A poesia é a eterna Tomada da Bastilha
o eterno querba-quebra
o enforcar de judas, executivos e catedráticos em todas
[as esquinas
e,
a um ruflar poderoso de asas,
entre cortinas incendiadas,
os Anjos do Senhor estuprando as mais belas filhas
[dos mortais...
Deles, nascem os poetas.
Não todos... Os legítimos
espúrios:
um Rimbaud, um Poe, um Cruz e Souza...

(Rege-os, misteriosamente, o décimo-terceiro signo do
[Zodíaco.)

Mário Quintana

Conversation with a Stone

Conversation with a Stone, By Wislawa Szymborska

translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

I knock at the stone's front door
"It's only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look around,
breathe my fill of you."
"Go away," says the stone.
"I'm shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we'll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won't let you in."
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I've come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don't have much time.
My mortality should touch you."
"I'm made of stone," says the stone.
"And must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don't have the muscles to laugh."
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I hear you have great empty halls inside you,
unseen, their beauty in vain,
soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.
Admit you don't know them well yourself.
"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,
"but there isn't any room.
Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste
of your poor senses.
You may get to know me but you'll never know me through.
My whole surface is turned toward you,
all my insides turned away."
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I don't seek refuge for eternity.
I'm not unhappy.
I'm not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I'll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will be only words,
which no one will believe."
"You shall not enter," says the stone.
"You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination."
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
I haven't got two thousand centuries,
so let me come under your roof."
"If you don't believe me," says the stone,
"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting from laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don't know how to laugh."
I knock at the stone's front door.
"It's only me, let me come in.
"I don't have a door," says the stone.

The Onion

The Onion, by Wisława Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

the onion, now that’s something else
its innards don’t exist
nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist
oniony on the inside
onionesque it appears
it follows its own daimonion
without our human tears
our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare to go
an internal inferno
the anathema of anatomy
in an onion there’s only onion
from its top to it’s toe
onionymous monomania
unanimous omninudity
at peace, at peace
internally at rest
inside it, there’s a smaller one
of undiminished worth
the second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth
a centripetal fugue
polypony compressed
nature’s rotundest tummy
its greatest success story
the onion drapes itself in it’s
own aureoles of glory
we hold veins, nerves, and fat
secretions’ secret sections
not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections

Crítica construtiva

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