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
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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
...