THE ART OF POETRY

1 9 R T H E A R T O F P O E T R Y R O B E R T M E Z E Y To look at the river made of time and water And to remember time is another river, To know that we too vanish like the river And that our faces flow away like water. To feel that being awake is another sleep That dreams it is not dreaming, that the death That spreads fear in our flesh is the very death That we die every night and call sleep. To see in the day or in the year a symbol Of all the days of man and of his years, And to transpose the insult of the years Into a music, a murmuring, a symbol. To see in death a sleep, or in sundown A golden sadness – such is poetry. Beggared yet immortal, poetry That comes back like the dawn and like sunset. Sometimes, in late afternoon, a face Looks at us from the depths of a dark mirror; Art ought to be like that unblinking mirror Revealing to each of us his one true face. They say Ulysses, sick and tired of marvels, Wept with love at the sight of Ithaca, Green and simple. Art is that Ithaca Of simple, green eternity, not marvels. 2 0 Y And it is also like the unending river, Going yet staying, mirror of the same Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same And yet another, like the unending river. after Borges ...