Saturday, August 2, 2008

Sonnet XX by Fernando Pessoa

When in the widening circle of rebirth
To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,
And try again the unremembered earth
With the old sadness for the immortal home,
Shall I revisit these same differing fields
And cull the old new flowers with the same sense,
That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields,
Of more age than my days in this pretence?
Shall I again regret strange faces lost
Of which the present memory is forgot
And but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed
Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought?
Were thy face one, what sweetness will't not be,
Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!

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I memorized this on the plane from Houston to MXCity, before arriving safe and sound. In the evening it rained, and I went up to the roof to test my raincoat. In every direction I looked I could see the lights of the city, as if I were looking out at four different huge metropoli from the top of a distant hill, but it was only one and I was somewhere near the middle.

1 comment:

Jessica said...

opportunity every which way, forsythe. not that this is surprising.