thank you fernando who wrote to me:

in such moments poetry, like visual arts do me so well...

I Am Tired

I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don't know:
It would not serve me at all to know
Since the tiredness stays just the same.
The wound hurts as it hurts
And not in function of the cause that produced it.
Yes, I am tired,
And ever so slightly smiling
At the tiredness being only this -
In the body a wish for sleep,
In the soul a desire for not thinking
And, to crown all, a luminous transparency
Of the retrospective understanding ...
And the one luxury of not now having hopes?
I am intelligent: that's all.
I have seen much and understood much of what I
have seen.
And there is a certain pleasure even in tiredness
this brings us,
That in the end the head does still serve for
something.


(24.06.1935)

'Selected Poems' translated from Fernando Pessoa by J.Griffin.


and it is true
it is not only our friends in this life time on whom we can rely
but we also have everyone who came before
who left us their thoughts and their visions
as maps for this journey
and the comfort of knowing we walk a shared path
and their is a "rightness" to where we find ourselves
however difficult it might be