To Wake, To Live Poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

How to wake up without hurt?
Restart without horror?
My sleep carried me
to that kingdom where life is inexistent
and I remain inert without passion.

How to repeat, day after day,
the incomplete fable,
to bear the likeness of all rough things
of tomorrow with the harsh things today?

How to protect myself from wounds
that tear in me the events,
any event
that resembles the earth and its purple
madness?
And the one more wound inflicted by myself
every single hour - torturer
of the innocent that I am not?

No one answers, life is cruel.