The best Author's Poems

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For him who only knows your color, red flag,
you must really exist, so that he can exist:
he who was covered with scabs is covered with wounds,
the laborer becomes a beggar,
the Neapolitan a Calabrese, the Calabrese an African,
the illiterate a buffalo or dog.
He who hardly knows your color, red flag,
won't know you much longer, not even with his senses:
you who already boast so many bourgeois
working-class glories,
you become a rag again, and the poorest wave you.

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Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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When death comes, it will have your eyes-
This death that is always with us,
From morning till evening, sleepless,
Deaf, like an old remorse
Or some senseless bad habit. Your eyes
Will be a pointless word,
A stifled scream, a silence;
The way they appear to you each morning,
When you lean over, alone,
Into the mirror. Sweet hope,
That day we too shall know
That you are life and you are nothingness.
For each of us, death has a face.
When death comes, it will have your eyes.
It will be like quitting some bad habit,
Like seeing a dead face
Resurface out of the mirror,
Like listening to shut lips.
We'll go down into the vortex in silence.

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Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.

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I'll wander the streets till I'm dead tired,
I'll learn to live alone and look each passing face
straight in the eye and still be what I am.
This coolness ascending in me, searching through my veins,
is an awakening each morning that I've never felt
so real -except that I feel stronger
than my body, and a colder shiver comes each morning now.
The mornings I had at twenty are now far: away.
And tomorrow, twenty-one: tomorrow I'll go out in tile streets.
I remember every stone, and the layers of the sky.
From tomorrow people will start seeing me,
I'll walk straight, and perhaps I'll pause
to see myself in windows. There were mornings once
when I was young and didn't know it, didn't even know
that who was passing by was me - a woman, mistress
of herself. The scrawny girl I used to be
was awakened by a weeping that went on for years.
Now it's as if that grieving never was.
And all I want are colours. Colours don't weep,
they're like an awakening: tomorrow colours
will return. Every woman will go out into the street,
each body a colour - even the children.
And this body of mine, dressed after so much paleness
in a frivolous red, will repossess its life.
I'll feel glances slide over me
and I'll know I'm me: a sidelong look
and I'll see I'm there, among people. Each new morning
I'll go out into the streets and look for colours.

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The most beautiful of oceans
it that which we never sailed.
The most beautiful of our sons
hasn't yet grown.
The most beautiful of our days
we still have to live.
And that
which I would like to you of most beautiful
I haven't yet told you.

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Be patient towards all that
is unresolved in your heart...
try to adore questions, so similar to
locked rooms and books written
in a foreign language.
Don't seek now those answers that can't be given to you
for you wouldn't be able to live with them.
Living is everything. Live the questions now.
Maybe you shall receive it, without you noticing it,
to live the distant
day in which you'll have the answer.

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Remember Barbara
It rained endlessly on Brest on that day
And you walked smiling
Radiant enchanted dripping-wet
In the rain
Remember Barbara
It was raining endlessly on Brest
And I came across you in the Rue de Siam
You were smiling
And I smiled the same
Remember Barbara
You whom I did not know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember even though that very day
Forget not
A man, under a porch, was sheltering
And he called your name
Barbara
And you ran towards him in the rain
Dripping-wet enchanted radiant
And you threw yourself into his arms
Remember that, Barbara
And do not resent it if I call you: "tu"
I say "tu" to everyone I love
Even if I have seen them only once
I say" tu" to all who love each other
Even if I do not know them
Remember Barbara
Forget not
The quiet and happy rain
Hereon your happy face
Hereon the happy town
The rain hereon the merry sea
On the arsenal
On the shuttle boat to Ushant
Oh Barbara
What a bloody farce the war
What's become of you now
In the rain of iron
Of fire, of steel of blood
And the one who clasped you in his arms
Lovingly
Is he now dead, missing, or still alive
Oh Barbara
It's raining endlessly on Brest
As it rained before
But now it is not the same, and all set abased
It is a rain of mourning, terrible and desolate
Now it is even no longer the storm
Of iron, of steel of blood
Merely clouds
That go coma like dogs
Dogs that go missing
Along the current over Brest
And will go pouring in the far
In the very far away from Brest
Of which there is nothing left.

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The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?
See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

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Don't wait to finish university,
to fall in love,
to find a job,
to get married,
to have children,
to see them settle down,
to lose those ten pounds,
for friday evening to arrive or sunday morning,
spring,
autumn or winter.
There isn't a better moment than this to be happy.
Happiness is a path, not a destination.
Work as if you didn't need money,
love as if no one ever hurt you and dance, as if no one saw you.
Remember that the skin wrinkles up,
the hair turns white and the days become years.
But the important things don't change: your strength and conviction have no age.
Your spirit is the duster that wipes away any cobweb.
Behind every goal is a new start.
Behind every result is a new challenge. While you're alive, feel alive.
Go on, even when everyone expects you to give up.