📷Photography

ON THE DEATH OF MARILYN

The most beautiful woman in the world has died,
so beautiful that she wasn’t just beautiful,
but more than calling her Marilyn,
we should have reserved for her alone
the plain, sober, simple name of woman,
instead of Marilyn, saying just woman.

There wasn’t, in truth, another woman like her in the world,
but she ingested too many barbiturates
one night before bed, when she felt alone
or suspected she had lived life the wrong way,
she, whose life, truth be told, was unworthy of her,
and who radiated life even as she snuffed it out.

There was no more beautiful woman in the world, but
one day, this woman exercised her right
to use and abuse being beautiful,
and decided once and for all not to be so any longer,
nor henceforth even to be a woman.

The last of her faces was a face of pain,
a face with no return, more than a face—an ocean,
and all the confusion and convulsion that could fit in it,
and all the violence and voice that in a mere face
the vastest ocean might intensely condense.

She took every pill she had and didn’t have,
and told the housekeeper, “Don’t wake me tomorrow,
I’m tired, I need to sleep,
I’m tired, and I need to rest.”

No one was ever as loved as she was,
no one was ever enveloped in such darkness.
She was a woman, the most beautiful woman,
but there’s nothing to do when, one day,
the hand of loneliness becomes a stone on our chest.

Near Marilyn, there were those pills;
they seemed a solution. She felt in her hand the mother,
she was so alone she thought she wasn’t loved,
that everyone, in the end, had used her,
that behind her, they saw the most common image of her,
the face, the body of a woman that demands adjectives,
even if beautiful is the adjective to use,
that instead of seeing her whole, they chose to dissect,
analyze, divide, multiply into parts.

The woman she was felt entirely alone,
she thought she was unloved, and time, as if, stopped.
She wanted, to the very end, to be something alive, something that moved,
a second was enough—it only took reaching out her hand,
and then time, yes, became something that passed.

VIII – THE HAND ON THE PLOW

Blessed is the one who wisely manages
sorrow and learns to spread it across the days.
Months and years may pass, and it will never run out.
Oh! how sad it is to grow old at the threshold,
to weave in one’s hands a heart that lags behind.
Oh! how sad it is to gamble on human returns,
on the blue balance of summer’s extreme mornings,
along the sea overflowing with us,
in the lingering farewell of our condition.

It is sad, in the garden, the loneliness of the sun,
to watch it from the city’s murmurs and houses
toward a vague promise of a river
and the little life granted to fingernails.
Sadder still is that we must be born and die
and that there are trees at the end of the street.

It is sad to go through life as one
who returns, and humbly, by mistake,
steps into death.
It is sad, in autumn, to conclude
that summer was the only season.

The companionable wind passed, and we did not know it,
and we failed to go to the depths of greenery,
like rivers that know where to find the sea,
and with which bridges, which streets, which people, which hills to dwell,
through the words of a water eternally spoken.
But the saddest of all is to remember tomorrow’s gestures.

It is sad to buy chestnuts after the bullfight,
amid smoke and Sunday on a November afternoon,
and to have as one’s future asphalt and a crowd,
and behind, a life with no childhood at all,
reviewing all this some time later.

The afternoon dies across the days.
It is very sad to wander among the absence of God.
But, oh poet, wisely manage your sorrow.

"RUY BELO"

I am sharing photos of landscapes, moments and experiences. Nature and sea are the most visited themes in my photo collection, but any attention-grabbing aspect can be photographed. Hope you enjoy it...