The Game Of Quoits Poem by Ruy Belo

In this square my childhood resurrects
here my life suddenly has a new wellspring
and surges with the force it had when it started
The time hasn't passed only my consciousness
which I feel temporarily transported back a few years
only my familiar sensation of reflecting on that time
of being a spectator of the succession of succeeding days
of not just living of not living without even knowing I live
in a delimited space where things and people
evidently were because they simply were
only that consciousness and sensation make me suspect
that the time that never passed has passed
The churchyard in late afternoon the game of quoits
the clatter of the quoits the iron stakes
the sun setting on itself and round like a simple
quoit tossed by someone through the space of the day
and ready to fall into the sea as onto a stake
the extravagant and thoughtless act of tossing
the quoit as if in that act life itself were at stake
the stock-still profiles of those who look on
with caps on their heads and hands in their pockets
it all happened it happens here thirty-five years ago
as if here no one had gotten old
or suffered or died or endured
the enormous hunger needed to produce one rich man
as if no one here had gone in search of his country
in countries far far away from here
It's the very same churchyard same afternoon same quoits
Even this café where I sit watching and watch with my thinking
is the same café where I split my first beer
with my father a beer that resisted
the heat of the summer day
in that wicker basket submerged in that well
It's the same taste I've had in my mouth
for many years now chewing wine and bread and life
the taste of women the taste of girls
forever inaccessible like any absolute
forever impossible yet pursued as if possible
the taste of defeat or the taste of palpable
earth day by day running through my fingers
and one day bound to fill my mouth forever
I've aged I know and all I've gained
is what I lost. I'm a grown-up now.
Meanwhile night has engulfed everything the game is over
and across the sky of time there was a man who passed
or a certain quoit that by chance was hurled into life
and that lives in the precarious trajectory before the fall

Translation: 2005, Richard Zenith