What To Write On Welcome Bags

verses about events do not.
There is no creation or death to poetry.
face it life is a single static
not heat or light.
affinities, anniversaries, incidents do not count.
not do poetry with the body,
that excellent, comfortable and complete body, as an enemy of lyrical effusion. Your
drop of bile, your mask of joy or pain in the dark are indifferent.
not reveal to me your feelings, which is prevalent
of misleading and tempt the long journey.
What you think or feel, that still is not poetry.

not sing to your town, leave it alone.
The song is not the movement of machines or the secret of the houses.
It is the music heard in passing, sound of the sea on the streets next to the line of foam.
Song is not nature or men
society.
For him, rain and night, fatigue and hope mean nothing.
Poetry (do not remove things poetry) eludes
subject and object.

not dramatize, do not invoke them
not pursued. Do not waste time lying.
not hate you. Your
ivory yacht, your shoe diamond
mazurkas and your superstitions, your family skeletons,
disappear in the curve of time are useless.


not recompose your buried and sad childhood.
not oscillate between the mirror and memory
dissipation.
dissipated That was not poetry. That
broke, glass was not.

silently penetrates into the realm of words.
There are poems waiting to be written.
are paralyzed, but there is despair,
is calm and cool on the surface intact. Helos
there alone and mute, in a state of dictionary.
coexists with your poems, before writing.
Be patient, if dark. Quiet, if you cause.

hopes that each is made and consumed
your word power
and power of silence.
not force the poem to let go of limbo.
not pick on the ground the poem that was lost.
not flatter the poem. Accept
as he accepted its final form and specified
in space.

Come and contemplate the words.

Each stage has a thousand secret
on the neutral face and asks, uninterested in response
poor or terrible, that you give:
Did you bring the key?

Repair:
barren of melody and concept,
them refuge in the night, words.
still wet and impregnated rolan
sleep in a river and become difficult to disregard.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade