First Draft Words While Reading Octavio Paz

Finally Awake

When I finally woke to life
also I woke to death—
for both are incarnate.
There would be no love without death—
No life without love.

The Poor

The poor walk with bruised, disjointed egos.
If only they knew we are all helpless paupers.

Assertions

She said:
“I don’t understand poetry.”
I said:
“I don’t understand prose.”
Neither assertion is wholly
false nor true.

Forest

A trap and its animal.
The beguiling hunter.
The forest and her trees.
The wounded and the free.


An excerpt From The Balcony (from East Slope) by Octavio Paz:

What you have lived you will unlive today
you are not there
                   but here
I am here
          at my beginning
I don’t deny myself
                   I sustain myself
Leaning over the balcony
                         I see
huge clouds and a piece of the moon
all that is visible here
people houses
               the real present
conquered by the hour
                      and all that is invisible
here
    my horizon
If this beginning is the beginning
it does not begin with me
                           I begin with it
I perpetuate myself in it

Copied from the the book A Tale of Two Gardens, which you can buy here:


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