10 quotes
Love means to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills —
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.
Rescue (1945)
Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
Rescue (1945)
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
Rescue (1945)
They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds
To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.
I put this book here for you, who once lived
So that you should visit us no more.
Rescue (1945)
Someone will read as moral
That the people of Rome or Warsaw
Haggle, laugh, make love
As they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Rescue (1945)
Only when two times, two forms are drawn
Together and their legibility
Disturbed, do you see that immortality
Is not very different from the present
And is for its sake. You pick a fragment
Of grenade which pierced the body of a song
On Daphnis and Chloe.
Rescue (1945)
From life, from the apple cut by the flaming knife,
what grain will be saved? My son, believe me, nothing remains,
Only adult toil,
the furrow of fate in the palm.
Only toil,
Nothing more.
Rescue (1945)
There were no words
In any human tongue
To be left for mankind,
Mankind who live on.
Rescue (1945)
Those dying here, the lonely
Forgotten by the world,
Our tongue becomes for them
The language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
And many years have passed,
On a great Campo di Fiori
Rage will kindle at a poet's word.
Rescue (1945)
I will neither resurrect the past nor return.
Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers.
I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes.
Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,
its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl
nest on the dead ogive.
Rescue (1945)