The Mystical Rose

(Found here)

The first time

I became conscious of form,

I said to my mother:

“Dona Armanda has a basket in her kitchen

where she keeps tomatoes and onions”

and began fretting that even lovely things

eventually spoil,

until one day I wrote:

“It was here in this room that my father died,

here that he wound the clock

and rested his elbows

on what he thought was the windowsill

but was the threshold of death.”

I understood that words grouped like that

made it possible to live without

the things they describe,

that my father was returning, indestructible.

It was as if someone had painted a picture

of Dona Armanda’s basket and said:

“Now you can eat the fruit.”

So, there is order in the world!

—where does it come from?

And why does order, which is joy itself,

and bathes in a different light

than the light of day,

make the soul sad?

We must protect the world from time’s corrosion,

cheat time itself.

And so I kept writing: “My father died in this room …

Night, you can come on down,

your blackness can’t erase this memory.”

That was my first poem.

~Adélia Prado (translated by Ellen Watson)