Lisbon

2016, Lisbon my interpretation of a very lovely, very melancholy city, expressed by way of some poetry its manifested and some pictures i took

 

by elena casale

Love is a fire that can burn unseen Love is a fire that can burn unseen.

It is a stinging wound that cant be felt, a pleasure whose displeasures always keen, a maddening pain from where no pain is dealt.

It is a yearning for no more than yearning, it’s, in a crowd, a solitary musing, it’s each enjoyments joyless overturning, it’s each enjoyments joyless overturning, it’s a belief a gain is gained in losing.

It’s wanting to go freely to our capture, a victory in serving our enslaver, faith towards the very killer to inflict our end. How can its graces so enrapture our human hearts, instill them such favor, when Love itself can so self-contradict?

-Luís de Camões (1524-1580)

Impossible We can live a joyful life without the hands of priests coming to join our hands in everlasting union with their legalities.

I cans your bare shoulders. touch them, appreciate their fair tone, and even kiss your olive-coloured eyes so darkly wreathed.

I can, if I so choose, to excite my hopes when you wear your thin linen shirt, slyly explore its crocheted front.

I can feel your heat when you come aflame, your cheeks burning rosy and vermillion, lying languidly, half-asleep, beside me on summer nights.

I can, with dauntless bravery, prepare lavish fears with you, help you make crême-brulée, and honeyed puddings.

I can give you anything, everything, give you my all, give you my life, my warmth, give you cognac, anthems of love, velvet dresses, and serge boots .

AndI canteen, with the look of a king (the king I am!) give you, my turtledove, good tickets from the big Spanish lottery.

So you see, we can live a life together, share the same comfortable rooms, eat the same sales and hams, and laugh at the poor lowlives.

We can, the two of us, with our good fortune, when the sun glows its deepest scarlet, sip our cocoa together from the same china cup.

And we can even, on loving nights, sleep together, playfully, our two heads resting on the same pillow.

-Cesário Verde (1855-86)

‘All through our dark streets at nightfall there is such a sullenness, such a melancholy, that the shadows, the bustle, the Tagus, the salt air stir me with an absurd longing to suffer.’

‘I want to feel. I do not know how, I am completely lost‌ I can neither become attached, nor still be me: I lack both the vanity to ascend to heaven, And the anointing to sink unto the mire. ‘

‘But my love, I wont say it out just yet…

For there is always beauty on a woman’s lips When she conceals unspoken poetry’

‘A little more sunshine - and I would be an ember.

A little more blue - and I would take flight’

Autopsychography The poet is a man who feigns And feigns so thoroughly, at last He manages to feign as pain The pain he really feels, And those who read what once he wrote Feel clearly, in the pain they read, Neither of the pains he felt, Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track There runs, to keep our reason busy, The circling clockwork train of ours That men agree to call a heart.

- Fernando Pessoa, himself (1888-1935)

The Sea of Portugal O salty sea, so much of whose salt Is Portugal’s tears! All the mothers Who had to weep for us to cross you!

All the sons who prayed in vain!

All the brides-to-be who never Married for you to be ours, O sea!

Was it worth doing? Everything’s worth doing If the soul of the doer isn’t small.

Whoever would go beyond the Cape Must go beyond sorrow.

God placed danger and the abyss in the sea, But he also made it heaven’s mirror.

““We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”