Picture

Poem by Iacyr Anderson Freitas

Translated from the Portuguese by Desirée Jung

Click here to download the text.

You are placed here
how finally will have to be:
unmoving, dead.

What the paper reveals
your nights have sensed:
a certain discomfort from existing,
one or other trembling in the hands.

Ah, the hands know how to betray, like
everybody.
And the eyes?
– frozen in a sunset
lost
from time and the cities,
but that now illuminates
your picture
with the same light
perceived by you in a dream.

A light that, on paper,
is like you,
and everybody,
unmoving fantasy.

Poem published in The Immense Hour.