Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen
Translated from Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
City of the Others
A dreadful atrocious enormous
Dishonesty
Covers the city
There is a whispering of plots
A telegraphy
Without gestures without signals without wires
Evil seeks out evil and they understand each other
They buy and they sell
And with the taste of something dead
The city of others
Is knocking at our door
The Planes
In the moonlit night the plane passes like a prodigy
Swift inoffensive and violent
Its uproar fills the whitewashed stillness of the walls around my life
It fills the blue halo
Of the outer night with fear
But suddenly a vibrant bird flies by
The moon falls once again upon the flowers
And the cypress contemplates its silence
But in another place and in another silence
Formulations passed in flights of terror
And death was born of the eggs they left behind
And then the moon no longer found the flowers
No one any longer lived within their whitewashed walls
And the night searched in vain for its cypress tree
I Lost Myself
I lost myself in the sordidness of a world
In which one had to be
Police usurper pharisee
Or whore
I lost myself in the sordidness of the world
I saved myself in the pureness of the earth
I sought myself in the wind and found myself in the sea
And never
Did a coastal ship sail from the shore
Without carrying me away
The Light and The House
Around the light
With shadows and whiteness
The house searches for itself
My hands almost touch
the soft breath
of its pure attentiveness