Poem no. 19 - Cyro Pimentel

I hear within me fugitive goddesses
Played on from afar by pastoral stars.

Paranoia in Astrakan - Roberto Piva

I saw a beautiful city whose name I forgot
where deaf angels roam the dawns coloring their eyes with invulnerable tears
where Catholic children offer lemons to little pachyderms that sneek out of their burrows

To my book - António Corrêa

Go, son, you're old enough,
you're emancipated;
you need to travel the world,
learn a bit about everything.

The Ungay Science – Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Maturity. that terrible gift
whose giver, giving it, takes away
all the spontaneous joy of receiving
under the icy shade of a headstone–

Incomplete silence - Lêdo Ivo

What an incomplete silence among so many sounds!
Now, and only now, they are trying to tell us
that they loved and they forgot, and always remained far
from any final truth. Love is an unredeemable
debt contracted in the dark
and only death can free the debtors from default.

Fountain - Astrid Cabral

Fountain:
Somersault of rain
In a mortar of stone.

In writing - Conceição Evaristo

In writing hunger

With empty-palmed hands

when the hole-stomach

expels famished desires

there is, in this demented movement

the dream-hoping

for any leftovers.

Native Land - Olavo Bilac

Love your native land with faithful pride and care!

Child! you'll never see a land like this so fair!

See what skies! what rivers! forests! and what sea!

Old Trees - Olavo Bilac

Look at these old trees, more lovely these

Than younger trees, more friendly too by far:

More beautiful the older that they are,

Victorious over age and stormy seas ...

Police Report - Alzira Rufino

The black woman is not stopped

by this brutish thing

by this lukewarm discrimination

Joe - Ana Célia da Silva

Down the street

there goes Joe,

sad and tired

Breathless Postcard - Armando Freitas Filho

Nature doesn't nurture anything

it never looks back

parasols and paradise

and every verb in the infinite

A philosopher’s agony - Augusto dos Anjos

I read the Phtah-Hotep, I read the obsolete

Rig-Veda. Yet  nothing gives me rest…

The Unconscious haunts me and I swirl possessed,

Restless harmattan in aeolian rage!

Consecrating the Alphabet - Leonor Scliar Cabral

ALEF

Horns rise up with force, igneous, aglow,

to burst apart the mysteries of time,

while a scribe revives prophecies divine 

on pure papyrus, salvaged long ago.

Blue Illusion - Arquímedes Arci

Haughty and conceited, like a pagan goddess
you passed by me, showing your spite,
and since that day I know that I have lost
the ineffable glory of a dream of love.

Mirror, My Mirror - Obed R. Souza

Mirror, my mirror!
My self- made image God!
It is you I adore!

Immortal Lust - Augusto dos Anjos

Do you really think that life-giving bliss,
The driving hunger of eurythmic atoms,
Will abort the molecules in motion

Talvez - Régis Bonvicino

Might be a bird passing over
might be a moment of silence
might be the sun in hiding
might be winter hasn't
passed

Man and Water - Mário Quintana

Let me be what I am,
what I have always been,

Seven-Headed Beast - Astrid Cabral

The more I age
the more heads I snip from the seven-
headed beast. And then I recognize him,
my intimate, my neighbour.