SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION Poem by Vasco Graça Moura

we often live according to a rash
notion of stark contrasts between good
and evil, greatness and wretchedness, the swift deeds
of an avid heroism and the inexorable march of destiny,

melodrama being part of our deepest nature,
obscurely but stubbornly nostalgic for the radical heart,
which races at top speed in contradictory dreams,
which engenders seductive images and thinks it lives in freedom,

but it's merely reckless and explosive, it stumbles
into the world's snares, into unexpected
treachery and death, or it must renounce in the face of the most
sublime flashes. passion rudely lacerates people

attached to happiness. the obstacles we meet
also have protagonists, scores to settle, cruel splendors,
feverish pursuits. and in desperate cases of love there's no way out.
from that unbearable failure is born lyrical, unbridled

melodrama, amid whirling, dizzying spurts
of blood and memory, of dashed hopes and tragic music,
in which someone dies, someone goes mad,
and someone is saved, and maybe someone writes down

the story, and someone else adds music
for the emotions to be more oppressive and perhaps more consuming
and facile, and someone desires this, it makes someone feel a shiver
of tingling banality, a voracious and unconfessed thrill.