tragicoptimist

Can I speak of death while alive?
Can I gripe of imagined hunger?
Can I fight our hidden verses?
Can I fake everything, being nothing?

Can I pull out truths from lies,
Or flood a desert with springs?
Can I change chords and lyres,
And make my night ardent sun?

If everything is reduced to empty words
and with them I cover my retreat,
From the shadow pulpit I deny light
like the song refuses to be embalmed.

Glass eyes and imprisoned wings,
I’ve remained at wasted words
Like the vestige of true things.

[ José Saramago, "Taxidermia, ou poeticamente hipócrita", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]

With dubious weights I put myself
To the scales refused until today.
It is time to know what is worth more:
If to judge, to absent, or to be judged.
I put on a flat plate what I am,
Matter, nothing else, that makes me,
The passing dream, the despair
Of grabbing violently or neglectfully
This shadow that is counting my days;
I put on the little life, the vile body,
Natural betrayals and reluctances,
I put on what love, its urgency,
The pleasure of passing among the stars,
The certainty of being only would I have
If it were you to weigh me, poetry.

[ José Saramago, "Balança", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]

No, there is no death.
Not even this rock is dead,
Not even the fruit that falls is dead :
My finger’s embrace gives life to them,
they breathe to the cadence of my blood,
and the breath that touches them.
So one day, when this hand grows dry,
in memory it will linger in another hand,
and the mouth will quietly keep
the taste of the mouths it kissed.

[ José Saramago, "Declaração", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]

God doesn’t exist yet, nor do I know when
a sketch of him will come, or at least a tone
in the confused design of the passage
of innumerable generations on this sphere.

No gesture is lost, no trace,
that the sense of life is only this:
make the earth the God we deserve,
and give the Universe the God it awaits.

[ José Saramago, "Criação", Os poemas possíveis, 1966 ]