Murilo Mendes Poems

USSR
USSR USSR
Foolish virtein
Why don´t you buy oil for your lamp?
...

Your eyes will judged
With much less clemency
That the rest of your body.
Your eyes have lingered too much
...

Who am I anyway?

I am the portrait of an ancestor.
I am that nightgown I wore
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The woman from the world´s end
Gives food to the rose trees,
Gives water to the statues,
Gives dreams to the poets.
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Not only will I blame
My parents and grandparents:
I will also sue the initial egg.
Everything is at fault.
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I do not find consolation in churches.
You, monk, cannot tell me what Christ will say.
You have gathered the least part of Him…
And His body and His blood
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I feel I am a fragment of God
As I am a remnant of a root,
A little of the water of the seas,
The stray arm of a constellation>
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The Spirit of Poetry transports me
To the shapeless region where I spend long hours, motionless
In the silence before the Creation of thing, terrifying.
Suddenly I extend my right arm into space and everything incarnates.
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I will die detesting the evil I have done
And without the force to do good.
I love the guilty as well as the innocent.
O Magdalen, you who have triumphed over the power of flesh,
...

A woman on the verandah
Leans over the sea
Contemplates the twin sea gulls
Expects a love letter.
...