DAYTIME SONG Poem by Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão

Love drinks its cup in silence
and is sorrow while it waits.
It imagines desire suddenly
and slowly gazes at the Other's gaze.
To know is to love, said divine
Plato or another ancient philosopher.
But how trace in the shade
of a screen of light the profile
of your absent face
if, in the daytime of our love,
memory makes it more forgotten?

When March brings me the new flower
that wordlessly opens its corolla,
I compare it to the love that erupts
in the pupil of a gaze in light and shade.
If every womb is blessed, even more
the womb of Spring and birds and flowers
in heat. Desire has also
imagined the wordless tongue,
that of the sound of poems and the Song.

This daytime Love is in the body
and in one another, like bread broken
at the banquet of the silent guests
who break it singly and with the others.
No absent thing partakes of it
when time's seasons, after Spring,
pass by us and stop
at the long table set for Summer.
Here all is presence, and time is the day.