The Enemy
My childhood was nought but a ravaging storm,
Enlivened at times by a brilliant sun;
The rain and the winds wrought such havoc and harm
That of buds on my plot there remains hardly one.
Behold now the Fall of ideas I have reached,
And the shovel and rake one must therefore resume,
In collecting the turf, inundated and breached,
Where the waters dug trenches as deep as a tomb.
And yet these new blossoms, for which I craved,
Will they find in this earth—like a shore that is laved—
The mystical fuel which vigour imparts?
Oh misery!—Time devours our lives,
And the enemy black, which consumeth our hearts
On the blood of our bodies, increases and thrives!
Ill Luck
This heavy burden to uplift,
O Sysiphus, thy pluck is required!
And even though the heart aspired,
Art is long and Time is swift.
Afar from sepulchres renowned,
To a graveyard, quite apart,
Like a broken drum, my heart,
Beats the funeral marches' sound.
Many a buried jewel sleeps
In the long-forgotten deeps,
Far from mattock and from sound;
Many a flower wafts aloft
Its perfumes, like a secret soft,
Within the solitudes, profound.
Interior Life
A long while I dwelt beneath vast porticoes,
While the ocean-suns bathed with a thousand fires,
And which with their great and majestic spires,
At eventide looked like basaltic grottoes.
The billows, in rolling depictured the skies,
And mingled, in solemn and mystical strain,
The all-mighteous chords of their luscious refrain
With the sun-set's colours reflexed in mine eyes.
It is there that I lived in exalted calm,
In the midst of the azure, the splendour, the waves,
While pregnant with perfumes, naked slaves
Refreshed my forehead with branches of palm,
Whose gentle and only care was to know
The secret that caused me to languish so.