Ruy Belo Biography
Born in a small town in central Portugal, Ruy Belo received a law degree at the University of Lisbon, in 1956, and a PhD in Canonical Law at the St. Thomas Aquinas University in Rome, in 1958. A devout Roman Catholic as a young man, he was a member of Opus Dei for ten years, quitting the organization in 1961. In that same year he published his first collection of poems and began studying Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Lisbon. He finished the course in 1967 and worked in Madrid as a Lecturer in Portuguese from 1971 to 1977. Ruy Belo also wrote literary criticism and translated: Montesquieu, Saint-Exupéry, Cendrars, Lorca and Borges. He died at his home in Queluz, outside Lisbon.
Birds are born on the tips of trees
The trees I see yield birds instead of fruit
Birds are the liveliest fruit of trees
...
When I was still young before I left home
ready to travel around in the world
I already knew about the waves' breaking
from the pages of all the books I'd read
...
It's been one year since your steps
last walked in our parish
Where do you who belonged to these fields
whose wheat is again turning ripe
...
We lived we conversed we resisted
we crossed paths on the street under the trees
we perhaps made a little stir
we traced timid gestures in the air
...
Happy the man who manages sadness wisely
and learns to divide it among the days
Though months and years pass it will never leave him
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