CSG reflections - keeper's quarters
Lydia, we know nothing. We are strangers
Wherever we may be.
Lydia, we know nothing. We are strangers
Wherever we may live. Everything is alien,
Nor speaks our language.
Let us in ouselves create a refuge,
And from the hurt and tumult
Of the world withdraw.
What more can love desire than not to let the others in?
Like a secret uttered in a mistery,
May be this become our sanctuary.
(1932)
in «ODES» by Ricardo Reis
I heard it told that once in Persia
Was engaged in some war or other,
When invaders were burning down the City,
Two chess players went on playing
Their endless game of chess.
In the shade of a spacious tree, their eyes
Were fixed upon an old chessboard,
And as each was anticipating some freer moment
When the chess piece had just been moved
And while awaiting his opponent´s next -
He'd soberly refresh is thirst
From a wine pitcher at his side.
Houses were burning, walls
And archways being sacked,
Women raped and propped
Against the fallen walls,
Children, pierced with lances,
Lying bloody in the streets...
But where they sat, near the City,
And far from all the tumult,
The chess players were playing
Their game of chess.
[...]
excerpt from «Ricardo Reis Odes»
Recalling who I was, I see somebody else.
In memory the past becomes the present.
Who I was is somebody I love,
Yet only in a dream.
The longing that torments me now
Is not from me nor by the past invoked,
But his who lives in me
Behind blind eyes.
Nothing knows me but the moment,
My own memory is nothing, and I feel
That who I am and who I was
Are two contrasting dreams.
(1930)
in «ODES» from «Poems of Fernando Pessoa»
Fine Rose, Margaret Zigler
Crown me with roses,
Crown me really
With roses -
Roses which burn out
On a forehead burning
So soon out!
Crown me with roses
And with fleeting leafage.
That will do.
(12.06.1914)
in «Selected Poems»
translated by J.Griffin.
Lydia, when Autumn comes,
Bearing Winter with it, lets us keep
One thought: not of Spring
To come, belonging to another;
Nor yet of Summer, when we're dead,
But of what's left of what is passing -
The yellowing of these leaves now
Making them different.
(1930)
in «ODES» by Ricardo Reis
Juliets Garden III by Gabriela
The roses I love in the gardens of Adonis,
Lydia, I love those fast fleeting roses
That on the day they were born,
On the same day they die.
Light for them is everlasting: born
After the sun comes up, they die
Before Apollo rounds
His visible track.
So let us make our life a single day,
And willingly ignore the night to come,
The night already past,
The little while we last.
(1914)
in «ODES» by Ricardo Reis
