Philip Larkin: The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, "The Mower" from Collected Poems. Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin.  Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Source: Collected Poems (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2001)

Conversas vadias: Agostinho Silva e Manuel António Pina

Richard Brautigan: My name

I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind.

If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.

That is my name.

Perhaps it was raining very hard.

That is my name.

Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong “Sorry for the mistake,” and you had to do something else.

That is my name.

Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.

That is my name.

Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.

That is my name.

Perhaps you stared into a river. There as something near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.

That is my name.

Or you heard someone calling from a great distance.

Their voice was almost an echo.

That is my name.

Perhaps you were lying in bed, almost ready to go to sleep, and you laughed at something, a joke unto yourself, a good way to end the day.

That is my name.

Or you were eating something good and for a second forgot what you were eating, but still went on, knowing it was good.

That is my name.

Perhaps it was around midnight and the fire tolled like a bell inside a stove.

That is my name.

Or you felt bad when he said that thing to you. She could have told it to someone else: somebody who was more familiar with her problems.

That is my name.

Perhaps the trout swam in the pool but the river was only eight inches wide and the moon shone on iDEATH and the watermelon fields glowed out of proportion, dark and the moon seemed to rise from every plant.

That is my name.

And I wish Margaret would leave me alone

Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar. (1968)

Mia Couto: O Universo num grão de areia

A humanidade nasceu em África. Mas podemos também dizer que a humanidade nasceu da capacidade de produzirmos e contarmos histórias. Somos humanos exatamente porque não somos apenas uma entidade biológica. Somos feitos de histórias tanto como somos compostos de células. As histórias são também um lugar onde nos inventamos eternos e encantados.

Mia Couto, O Universo num grão de areia. Lisboa: Caminho, 2019.

Fotografia: Sebastião Salgado.

Jorge Luis Borges: El hacedor

Un hombre se propone la tarea de dibujar el mundo. A lo largo de los años puebla un espácio con imágenes de províncias, de reinos, de montañas, de bahias, de naves, de islas, de peces, de habitaciones, de instrumentos, de astros, de caballos y de personas. Poco antes de morir, descubre que ese paciente laberinto de líneas traza la imagen de su cara. 

Jorge Luis Borges, El hacedor (1960)

Adília Lopes: O presente

Vou-te dar um presente
eu gosto de presentes
é uma caixa de jóias
é tão bonita
dentro está um anel com uma pedra preciosa
porque é tão grande?
toma cuidado
dentro está um anel com uma pedra preciosa
mas talvez nunca o chegues a pôr no dedo
na caixa está uma serpente
para pegares no anel tens de abrir a caixa
se abrires a caixa a serpente pode picar-te o dedo
e tu podes morrer
se não abrires a caixa

Adília Lopes, Um jogo bastante perigoso (1985)

Frank O’Hara: Why I am not a painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Frank O’Hara.