segunda-feira, 25 de outubro de 2010

Nineteen Thirty-Eight

That was the year the Nazis marched into Vienna,
Superman made his debut in Action Comics,
Stalin was killing off his fellow revolutionaries,
The first Dairy Queen opened in Kankakee, Ill.,
As I lay in my crib peeing in my diapers.
“You must have been a beautiful baby,” Bing Crosby sang.
A pilot the newspapers called Wrong Way Corrigan
Took off from New York heading for California
And landed instead in Ireland, as I watched my mother
Take a breast out of her blue robe and come closer.
There was a hurricane that September causing a movie theater
At Westhampton Beach to be lifted out to sea.
People worried the world was about to end.
A fish believed to have been extinct for seventy million years
Came up in a fishing net off the coast of South Africa.
I lay in my crib as the days got shorter and colder,
And the first heavy snow fell in the night.
Making everything very quiet in my room.
I believe I heard myself cry for a long, long time.

Charles Simic

2 comentários:

  1. Mais enfático ainda , «Prodigy» :

    I grew up bent over
    a chessboard.
    I loved the word endgame.
    All my cousins looked worried.
    It was a small house
    near a Roman graveyard.
    Planes and tanks
    shook its windowpanes.
    A retired professor of astronomy
    taught me how to play.
    That must have been in 1944.
    In the set we were using,
    the paint had almost chipped off
    the black pieces.
    The white King was missing
    and had to be substituted for.
    I’m told but do not believe
    that that summer I witnessed
    men hung from telephone poles.
    I remember my mother
    blindfolding me a lot.
    She had a way of tucking my head
    suddenly under her overcoat.
    In chess, too, the professor told me,
    the masters play blindfolded,
    the great ones on several boards
    at the same time.

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