PAULO BOMFIM
Born in São Paulo in 1927, Paulo Bomfim has become a popular cultural figure on radio and television in his native city, through his acting and recorded poetry readings. A leader of the Diálogo literary group, he was honored by the Brazilian Academy of Letters for his Antonio Triste (1946). Among his subsequent volumes of poetry, more exciting for their promise rather than for their absolute artistic worth, are Tansfiguração (1951), Relógio de Sol (1952), and O Colecionador de Minutos (1960).
Tempest
The tempest lives
As though you were the man walking through it
The tempest lives
As though you were
Rain, wind and lightning
Walking through the man.
The Sea
By way of the bridge of spume
You have arrived.
1 don't know beyond the beach:
The world that generated you;
Whether you have sprung from the breast of day
Or from the cry of night.
1 recognize myself only
In the coral of fingernails and of mouth,
In the liquid eyes,
In the braids of seaweed.
1 know that you float in me,
And your body is clothed
In voices;
Yet
You will return to the world of white sands,
And my whisper will be salt,
Shining in your hair.
The Fourth Kingdom
Your hair will tell you
Of the soul of the forest,
Your teeth will reflect
The language of rocks,
Your body will cry
The hunger of animals.
You will be rescued from the shipwreck
Of red rivers:
Forget the cradle of light
And turn yourself into light.
Hands
My stranger hands
Darning the non-being,
Gathering silver bluebells
In empty flowerbeds,
Caressing faces
That smile sweetly
With the melancholy of everything that will not exist.
My stranger hands,
Crossed in the night,
Do not recognize themselves.
Reincarnation
I die with the days.
Each night is a trip
Through the kingdom of the dead,
A flower that dispetals
On my bloodless fingers,
A life that I lose
Among angles of fire.
Each morning I keep silent
Before what I was,
I discover the sun for the first time,
And 1 let the flesh envelop
The mystery of the bones,
And the bones bear on their white stems
Buds of eternity.
Madness
To sow poppies
In the gardens of chance.
To be delirium with kindled feet,
Tracing spirals
In humid tunnels of brilliance.
To feel yourself as laughter of mirrors,
Music of daggers,
Forest lost in fear.
To grope
In the chasm that attracts chasms,
In the moons of nothing dreaming transparencies,
In silver bells burnt with sound.
To be the gardens of chance,
The sick nerves,
The ruined wall of the captured world;
To die with the cry
And to be reborn from the monochord idea
That drips in the soul
Of the great glassy-eyed day.
The Shadow
We were planned
To deny.
We were created
To be
The night before the star.
We are the black angel
That visits the flesh:
In us the colors are perfumes,
Drops of sun
That slowly evaporate
After moistening the face of the dead.
We inhabit the interior of forms,
The emptiness of gestures,
The solitude of life.
In the night of ages we kindled the torch of gold
So that men would find themselves reflected.
Denying, we affirm.
In the noon of ages
We are soul.
The Idea
He who dies
Turns into idea.
Think your dead.
In each word
Two eyes are spying upon you from the past.
Everything sleeps in the depth of us:
The dispetaled roses in the gardens of Persia,
The moons of blood in Babylon,
The silver galleys sinking in the Nile.
What passes
Remains.
One day we shall be ideas
Fructifying silence.
Then, no one will remember us
Because we will be present,
In the soul of the idea, in the spoken flesh.
The Invention
Invent in the undergrounds
Moist with silence
The life that created you.
Change the idea into flesh,
The thought into rock,
The dream into water,
The anxiety into fire,
The death into cloud.
Recreate the form
That surrounds you:
Return to the elements that make your flesh,
Return to the beginning of your mystery:
You will be the stone-tomb,
The wood-coffin,
The undone rose,
The male and the female,
Good and evil.
From the womb of your grief
You will be reborn,
Bent over yourself
You will suck the night
And from your lips the day will flow.
— Invent death.
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