Más allá de las palabras

Sueño, de Gustave Courbet

La visión

Cuando la vida de los hombres va perdiéndose,
Como una lejanía donde resplandeciera el tiempo de los sarmientos,
Vacía contémplase la campiña del Verano,
Con oscura imagen el bosque aparece.

Que la Naturaleza termine la imagen de los tiempos,
Que se demore, hasta alcanzar
La perfección, y que la cima de los cielos
Para los hombres brille, como árboles de flores estallantes

Friedrich Hölderlin

Nadie sabrá que nos hemos ido

Vendrán Lluvias Suaves, de Ray Bradbury

There Will Come Soft Rains

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Sara Teasdale

Forastero en tierra extraña

Forastero en Tierra Extraña, de Robert A. Heinlein

THE laws of God, the laws of man,
He may keep that will and can;
Not I: let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs.
Their deeds I judge and much condemn,
Yet when did I make laws for them?
Please yourselves, say I , and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.
And how am I to face the odds
Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

They will be master, right or wrong;
Though both are foolish, both are strong.
And since, my soul, we cannot fly
To Saturn nor to Mercury,
Keep we must, if keep we can,
These foreign laws of God and man.

A. E. Housman

Lost in a Lost World, The Moody Blues

A veces, la cosa es la palabra

Mi abuelo tenía un reloj de bolsillo.

Dorado, sin grabados, de carátula blanca y números romanos, manecillas finas y talladas -salvo la del segundero.

El minutero es asimétrico. Bueno, no realmente: más bien es simétrico a lo largo de un eje oblicuo, y con una reducción progresiva -¡Bah! Digamos que se escapa a mi capacidad de descripción.
La leontina es también dorada, de eslabones grandes, no demasiado larga.

A veces lo abro y lo miro largamente; y al cabo me siento mejor.

Sí, es un reloj común y corriente. No lo sé; es que era de mi abuelo.

Night Vision

When the darkness takes you
With her hand across your face
Don’t give in too quickly
Find the thing she’s erased

Find the line, find the shape
Through the grain
Find the outline, things will
Tell you their name

Suzanne Vega