TREES Poem by António Ramos Rosa

What trees try to say
in their slow silence, their vague murmuring,
the sense they have, there where they are,
the reverence, the resonance, the transparency
and the bright and shadowy accents of an airy phrase.
And the shade and the leaves are the innocence of an idea
that between water and space turned itself to lithe integrity.
Beneath the magic breath of the light they are transparent boats.
I don't know if it's air or blood budding from their boughs.
I hear the finest foam of their green throats.
I am not, never will be, far from that pure water
and those ancient lamps of hidden isles.
What pure serenity of memory, what horizons
surrounding the silent well! It is a song in sleep
and the wind and light are the breath of a child
who upon a bough of a tree embraces the world.