Eugénio de Andrade Poems

Children grow in secret. They hide themselves in the depths and darker reaches of the house to become wild cats, white birches.
...

Wherever the earth is crag and scrub, the goats are there—the black ones, girlishly skipping, leaping their little leaps from rock to rock. I've loved their nerve and frisk since I was small.
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The gaze lets go from ripeness.
I don't know what to do with a gaze
overflowing from a tree,
what to do with that ardour
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Far off I see my docile animals.
They are tall and their manes are burning.
They run, searching for a spring,
and sniff the purple among broken rushes.
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They are lithesome, full of grace.
Ferocious, too,
like a bunch of burning rooftop cats.
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Not even eyes know what to say
to this rose of joy
open in my hands
or in the tresses of the day.
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Peaches, pears, oranges,
strawberries, cherries, figs,
apples, melon, honey dew,
oh, music of my senses,
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Body on a horizon of water,
body open
to the slow intoxication of fingers,
body defended
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They had faces open to whoever passed.
They had legends and myths
and a chill in the heart.
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When tenderness
seems tired at last of its offices

and sleep, that most uncertain vessel,
...