My water possessed everything.
Bread of humble people, blood of battles, papyrus of knowledge.
Tears from those who wiped their faces in it.
But my greatest treasure: I reflected
Cleopatra's image in love.
Nobody got into the fugacious thing as I did.
Which river reflected more deserts, ruins on its shore?
O man, you have got the Sphinx's destiny:
Being great as the desert...
World - Egyptian pyramid -
Grave of builders.
---------------------------------------------------
"Thank you for your letter, and sending me your
wonderful poems about Egypt - it is greatly appreciated."
(Ministre of Culture - Egypt)
KARNAK
Where did they search for foundation
To support such a greatness?
Temples were built by gods themselves.
The desert breeze blows over the ruins.
I envy you for millennia!
Priests offering, groups talking.
Slaves serving beautiful women, noblemen in cars.
O power of ruins!
I can hear you! I understand you in a dead language.
I miss it more than they miss
Their own house, their own lives.
TWO WHEELS...
Civilization walked on two wheels:
The wheel and the Zero.
CLEOPATRA
Caesar! Crowds! Applauses!
I do not think about the dazzlement of the discovery!
How many did you rape, spoil and oppress?
A legionnaire diverted the spear directed to Caesar,
The cliff says to Prometheus: - I admire you!
I symbolize your pain!
How imperfect is the world!
Getting old: see wrinkles through mirror:
I am the dream of every mortal: never die!
In Judea's Desert God appeared to Judas:
People want to stand up
Chiromancer - I have foreseen all dramas of my era
It was not Alexander Magno's crime made for fun
Oh vain effort of Nature
History lies! I have never loved nor been loved.
Could my brother love me?
Caesar, Anthony... Plebeians' dreams came true:
Possess the queen, have sons to be kings
They loved the power, not the woman!
How many times, from the Palace's window,
Have I seen the Moon reflecting the helmet of soldiers
Embraced with my subjects!
I have envied them - queens who envied me:
O my crown, how many heads have you ringed?
COLISEUM
Quadrigae! Triumph! Fanfares!
Fallen gladiators begging for life
Fallen martyrs seeking it in another world!
Just a thumb pushing thousand bodies to nothing...
How many men went down your bleachers
- As we do today -
Lamenting the end of the spectacle! ...
TUTANCAMON
Your treasures, o beautiful Pharaoh!
I think about the slaves digging your tomb,
Carrying on the burning sand your gold,
Under the orders of their slave holders.
I think about millenniums after the felás descendants
Of these slaves - digging the same burning sand
Under the orders of other lords, european archeologists...
KINGS
How many people shed blood
To give purple to your mantles?
None of your subjects remains anymore.
O Power of Power! You still survive.
Thrones, crowns, jewels and palaces
Live now in ruins or museums.
New subjects:
Crowds contemplate them in ecstasy.
ANONYMITY
A slave brought the snake to Cleopatra,
A soldier also desired Uria's wife.
A trump followed Buddha's road.
A serf heard the mortal schemes of Borgia's levers.
A sailor first trod on the shore
Of the New Discovered Continent.
A beggar who saved
One of the Ines de Castro's murderers.
A passerby saw the Hiroshima's fatal airplane...
Let us speak about the anonymous
People, not the great ones:
Slaves in the construction of Pyramids
Building someone else's Immortality.
PROMETHEUS
You give beauty to my sisters, the ugly stones.
O Man, your creations don't cry
As you do, divine creation!
ATLAS
You do everything in the world, except the world itself...
So many billions of galaxies!
Why was it given to me the saddest planet of all?
MIDAS
My touch transforms everything it touches into gold...
Ah if my vision could do the same!
METHUSELAH
Happy bind man whom we see and who doesn't see us...
Getting old! Having more years to remember
Than years to live!
AHASVERUS
Witnessing that everything passes away, everything ends,
Millennia vanish one by one... O illusion!
My immortality is to watch someone's death!
JUDAS
"There are not good nor bad men! All have their role!
Somebody will denounce Jesus
To pour - according to the divine plan -
The blood for his brothers.
I have chosen the man as Jesus was!
Only you, in your world, will know the reason of your action.
Only you will know your greatness, no body else.
You will suffer the hate of all generations!
Ah there will never be solitude like yours!
Even to die you have to stand by yourself.
Jesus' martyrdom will be glorified!
Yours - despised!
Jesus will sacrifice Himself for Mankind!
You will sacrifice your self for Him."
...God Kissed his face.
HISTORY
To be more than others, to be always the first...
Is it to compensate the level action of death?
Life is race
Where everyone arrives the last.
Some existed, others will cease to exist
Nothing exists.
OLD COIN
In the hands of kings, soldiers, slavers, courtesans, avaricious men!
I have followed them till the end: I have been buried with them.
Resurrected I live now in museums.
So sad to survive mankind...
I miss all the beggars of the past.
THE GREATEST CRIME OF HISTORY
Soaking a child with naphta to see it burn.
It was rather that of soldiers in mission of peace in Bosnia
Throwing candies to children in fields
Just to know whether they were mined...
No, dear reader, this cannot have happened.
The Poet invented the greatest wickedness of the world.
The planet has turned for billion of years without Man.
Without him, the dawn would have the same brilliance
In the look of the animals.
Some day some astral species will ask:
At moment
The human species was happy in this planet?
At what moment these was a civilization?
CENSUS OF HISTORY
I
Two million peopled Antiquity
How many were above the famous ones: Kings
Artists, philosophers, mystics, generals?
Names cited by historians on books,
Names in numbers: 80,000 dead Romans.
Battle of Canes.
Vestal seduced by Catilina.
The man who was cherished of Pericles's wife.
II
Those who were mummified:
Egyptian adolescent in the museum (eternal adolescence).
Mummy of an indian from an extinct tribe in the Amazon Forest:
The unique survivor is dead.
III
Citizen of Mesopotamia
Whose existence we know because he left in cuneiforms
Proofs of having cheated the Revenue Service, but not tax of death.
IV
A spectator scribbled his name on the bleachers of Coliseum
And died without a tombstone
Lost cemetery of the past... It has only remained
The tombstone of his life.
V
Name on bas relief.
Names on tomb inscriptions:
Euchopio, the slave, complaining his little child's death.
Names on fragments of ceramics: "Feliz fecit"...
Fragments of immortality.
Truncated names, only halves of broken inscriptions...
Those who hardly remained in History.
OH VAIN EFFORT
Making the Simian become Homo Sapiens!
What is reason for, if it leads us to madness:
May be create the Infinite?