Barefoot

We took off our shoes
In the middle of the hot city.
And we looked so loose,
Like newborn and pretty.
With the same speed, if we could
Free our thoughts for a while
From their heavy boots —
It would be easier, mile after mile,
To leap barefoot into childhood.

Abraham Sutzkever
.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn(1606-1669)

José Agostinho Baptista (1948)



NÃO É MÚSICA

Não é música o que ouvimos.
Não é de água este brilho de prata.

Eu estou aqui sobre as pontes do rio.
Outros são os que espreitam pela bruma das margens.

Talvez me lembre:
tu vinhas devagar pelo lado das acácias.
Cingias cada árvore e as colunas, os braços de um
deus cruel, o saber dos templos.

Não é um salmo o que ouvimos.
Não é de harpas este lamento,
não é o ofício das mãos esculpindo um rosto,
não é a palavra de deus que ecoa nas escarpas.

Algures te ocultas e não deixas sinais.
Quem és tu
cujo perfil se desvanece, cuja doçura se perde nos
confins da tarde?

Eu estou aqui onde se unem as margens, onde escurecem
as sendas e as sombras,
onde correm as nuvens, as pedras, as águas.

Outros são os que te aguardam pelo lado das acácias.

José Agostinho Baptista, Biografia
.

Walter Benjamin (1842-1940)

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus* shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.