fernando pessoa

Written in a Book Abandoned on the Trip

I come from around Beja.
I’m going to the centre of Lisbon.
I’m not bringing anything and won’t find a thing.
I feel the exhaustion from what I won’t find.
And my yearning comes not from the past or the future.
In this book I have inscribed the image of my dead design:
I was, like the grasses, and never uprooted.

(as Alvaro de Campos)

trans by Edward Honig and Susan M. Brown