Poem of the Week for Friday, April 30, 2010

• Editor’s note: In recognition of National Poetry Month each week in April a poem will be published in Lifestyle. This week meet Antonio Porcia, an Italian basket-weaver and, later, printer who emigrated to Argentina with his mother and seven younger siblings. He lived and died there largely in solitude and poverty. “Voices,” translated by W.C. Merwin, is a book of one or two-line aphorisms shared by local poet Michaella Mintcheff. Merwin says of the poet: “Porcia’s utterances are as spiritual, quite as much as a literary testament… His close friend Roberto Juarroz remembers how “his way of listening (to others)  seemed to create a depth in his companions.” Porcia himself believed that “to keep someone company is not just to be with them, but to be within them.”

Excerpts from    ‘Voices’

By Antonio Porcia

• One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

• He who tells the truth says almost nothing.

• They will say that you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

• Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life.

• If you’re not going to change your route, why change your guide?

• The confession of one humbles all.

• The heart is an infinity of massive chains, chaining little handfuls of air.

• A full heart has a room for everything but an empty heart has a room for nothing. Who  understands?

• A large heart can be filled with very little.

•The condemnation of an error is another error.

• Even the smallest of creatures carries the sun in its eyes.

• We see by something which illuminates us, which we do not see.

• What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same and what they say is never the same.