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Thereza Motta started publishing her poems in 1980 in collective books together with some fellow poets in Mackenzie University in São Paulo, while she was at Law School, where she founded a poetry group. She has already published three solo books: Joio & trigo (1982), Areal (1995) and Sabbath (1998). See some of her poems here: |
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Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. T.S. Eliot (The Waste Land)
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Lilacs impersonal transfigured memoryless cast aside forgotten. Roots moving beneath the earth under the summer rain. No winter can take the seeds away from its bosom. They'll stay there motionless until the following spring.
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Your heart peeps in silence slowly beating as the afternoon lingers for we expect nothing to happen in half an hour. Whatever comes will be new and whatever remains will have survived.
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The pearls were your eyes, see how they slide on the humid cloth. Every time you see me will be as first. Nothing compares to this moment. Nothing will ever be the same.
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The wind whispers under the closed doors in our house and I have nothing to remember. What is there to remember? Anything I remember will still make part of my soul. And this soul won't be mine until there's nothing left to remember.
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Unreal the city covers the plain. Had we heard the singing of the streams, had we walked barefoot on the crevasses, had we danced as enlightened despots. We'll always bring in the news, we'll always be searching and never will find, we'll always be seeking but we won't need to know.
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I drift by your side over the waters. I blow on your breast like the wind. I slip and erase my name from the sands. I step down the elephant and walk by the shore. Sometimes I forget you, sometimes I listen to you. I'm by your side everywhere.
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What used to be here now is not. One has to be patient to be alive. The sleeping hours fray the same yarn ball as before. Nothing was left, only the waiting. The waiting and another long walk ahead of us. We stop amid the trees and listen to the streams cutting into the silence.
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I walk beside you. Even if you don't see me, I walk beside you. Soundless steps, musicless waters, drifting moonlight over forests, cool winds against ruined walls. This is why we're like this: vast and steady, infinite and confident, moving and speechless. I could have answered you but you wouldn't have listened to me. I sat beside you and put my hand over your hand: your cold hand in mine. Behind me, another day was ending. None of us will ever know. I'll give you what is yours. But nothing belongs to me.
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