The third portrait

The world cries white snowflakes;
tomorrow it will giggle
bluewinged butterflies.

Today we are weeping
over the small bare graves.
Below us the earth, unstoppable
pushes up its silent green.

The second portrait

This too is a message --

We have forgotten how to read.
See only stars --
We track the tides and storms
map different routes to work.  

We have forgotten how to read

the secrets of an opened bird.

The ancients with their magicians,

their calendars and instruments,

were wiser.

In the East and in the Americas,

in green Egypt, in their temples,

their eyes grew deepsouled from searching.

They read the circles in the world.

These lives we live now are circled too.

We live within one age:

another will succeed it.

After winter, always, there is spring.

Everything bad is a sign

we have forgotten how to read.

When landmines are sown

and reaped

when women and children are raped:

Read.

These are the death throes are the birth pains
the end of an age --
The entry to a kinder, wiser world.

We will live, then, more soul and soul.

Anyway that’s what I choose to believe.

It’s a more hopeful way of looking at the world

(we have to live in it)

grieving -

The first portrait.

When children die

don't cry:

They have gone out like stars,

still hoping.

We only are left.

Envy them.

Envy the passionate

the humanists, the atheists

with their fairy tales.

Envy the innocent dead.

Don’t cry for their small ends.

Cry for yourself:

you have still so many moments

to be borne.

Even the distractions become tedious;

the carousing habitual as toothbrushing.

I go on buttoning and unbuttoning.

I have given up finding,

in their lips,

any door –

I have come to desire one thing only:

to sleep through long seconds.

There is no one to ask.

We are all trapped in boxes,

breathing.