is not the last day of time.
Other days will come
and new thighs and wombs
will share the warmth of life with
you. You will kiss mouths, you will
tear up documents,
you will travel and enjoy so many celebrations
of birthdays, graduations, promotions,
glory, sweet death with symphony
and chorale,
that your days will be full and
you will not hear the outcry,
the irreparable howls
of the wolf, in solitude.
The last day of time
is not the last day of everything.
Always a fringe of life remains
where two men sit down.
A man and his opposite,
a woman and her foot,
a body and its memory,
an eye and its brilliance,
a voice and its echo,
and who knows?--maybe God also ...
Accept with simplicity this
gift of chance.
You deserve to live another year.
You wish you could live forever
and drain the centuries to their dregs.
Your father died, your grandfather died.
Many things in you are already dead,
and the others squint at death,
but you are alive. Once again you are alive,
and glass in hand
you wait for the dawn.
The comfort of getting drunk.
The comfort of dancing and shouting,
the comfort of the bright red ball,
the comfort of Kant and poetry,
all of them ... and none is a solution.
And now--the morning of a new year.
Things are clean, orderly.
The tired body freshens up with lather.
All the alert senses are functioning.
The mouth is eating life.
The mouth is choked with life.
Life streams from the mouth,
smears the hands, the sidewalk.
Life is fat, oily, deadly, unauthorized.
–Carlos Drummond De Andrade
(translated from Portuguese by John Nist)
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