A Tree

Poem by Iacyr Anderson Freitas

Translated from the Portuguese by Desirée Jung

Click here to download the text.

[for José Afrânio M. Duarte]

The only personal image:
that tree under the rain
impassive and hard.

City adrift
white curtains advancing more and more
into the night, for two weeks
– no blue, nor ray
of light or fire.

Houses with anchors at the door edges.
Sludge, dirt, slime. The landscape
begins to change colors.
One barely guesses the nearby mountain.

A dense wall seals the view,
The waters draw the earth and the sky.
Now everything composes
a fraternity
without contours.
What was a reality
spins
its handle.

Even topography bends
to the storm, unhurriedly.

Ignoring the despair,
only that tree.

Impassive in its metaphor, surrendered
to total condemnation:

to be in the rain, subjected,
witnessing all,
averse to the sky and the land.

Poem published in The Immense Hour.