[Another piece from my back catalog. A loose translation of a poem by the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros]

Photo by Rob Wicks on Unsplash

Poem

(After the Portuguese of Manoel de Barros)

All I know – is that
poetry is bottled in words.
That I am destined to know
almost nothing, I know;

and I know nothing very well.

I don’t cultivate
correspondences with real things.
To my mind
power doesn’t come from discovering gold;

power comes with the discovery of
insignificances –
mine and the world’s.

And,
because I say that,
they will love and upset me
as the idiot I am.

I have a weakness for that sort of thing.