Ruy Belo
Ruy Belo Poems
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
...
There's ocean there's woman
and both of them reach me in amiable bays
opening up for example in the churchyard of sunday afternoons
I hear them call but not just any old way
...
Oh houses houses houses
houses are born and live and die
While alive they stand out from each other
they stand out namely by their smell
...
A hint of absinthe fills the air when the beetles
emerging from the rotten bark of the old oaks
begin their flight in the month of june
Picking hazelnuts we walk through the garden
...
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
...
More or less here not long ago there were some children
three or four children more or less right there
There must have been children there's so much sun
...
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.)
The Best Poem Of Ruy Belo
A FEW PROPOSITIONS WITH BIRDS AND TREES THAT THE POET CONCLUDES WITH A REFERENCE TO THE HEART
Birds are born on the tips of trees
The trees I see yield birds instead of fruit
Birds are the liveliest fruit of trees
Birds begin where trees end
Birds make the trees sing
On reaching the height of birds the trees swell and stir
passing from the vegetable to the animal kingdom
Like birds their leaves alight on the ground
when autumn quietly falls over the fields
I feel like saying that birds emanate from the trees
but I'll leave that manner of speaking to the novelist
it's complicated and doesn't work in poetry
it still hasn't been isolated from philosophy
I love trees especially those that yield birds
Who hangs them there on the branches?
Whose hand is it whose myriad hand?
I pass by and my heart's not the same
Translation: 1997, Richard Zenith
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