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from The Keeper of Flocks
(1911-1912)

by Alberto Caeiro da Silva

from I

* * *

I don’t have ambitions or desires.
Being a poet isn’t my ambition,
It’s my way of being alone.

* * *

II

When I look, I see clear as a sunflower.
I’m always walking the roads
Looking right and left,
And sometimes looking behind…
And what I see every second
Is something I’ve never seen before,
And I know how to do this very well…
I know how to have the essential astonishment
That a child would have if it could really see
It was being born when it was being born…
I feel myself being born in each moment,
In the eternal newness of the world…

I believe in the world like I believe in a marigold,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it
Because to think is to not understand…
The world wasn’t made for us to think about
(To think is to be sick in the eyes)
But for us to see and agree with…

I don’t have a philosophy: I have senses…
If I talk about Nature, it’s not because I know what it is,
But because I love it, and that’s why I love it,
Because when you love you never know what you love,
Or why you love, or what love is…

Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not thinking…

(3/8/1914)

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.

But I don’t want the present, I want reality;
I want things that exist, not time that measures them.

What is the present?
It’s something relative to the past and the future.
It’s a thing that exists in virtue of other things existing.
I only want reality, things without the present.

I don’t want to include time in my scheme.
I don’t want to think about things as present; I want to think of them as things.
I don’t want to separate them from themselves, treating them as present.

I shouldn’t even treat them as real.
I should treat them as nothing.

I should see them, only see them;
See them till I can’t think about them.

See them without time, without space,
To see, dispensing with everything but what you see.
And this is the science of seeing, which isn’t a science.

(undated)

*

I went out very early in the morning today
Because I woke up even earlier
And there was nothing I wanted to do…

I didn’t know which road to take
But the wind rose strong, sweeping up from one side,
And I followed the road where the wind pushed at my back.

That’s how my life has always been, and
That’s how I’d like to be able to have it always be —
I go where the wind leads me
And don’t feel like thinking.

(undated)

*

The Last Poem
(dictated on the day of his death)

It may be the last day of my life.
I saluted the sun by raising my right hand,
But I didn’t really salute it or even say good-bye to it.
I showed it that I’ve liked seeing it before. Nothing else.

(undated)

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