Babel

In all the words only had a language

Peter Bruegel the Elder, he painted

Babel,

just built between the words and men

of armed arms

The confusion, that

Bruegel did not see

in its piramide unfinished

with a cloud blow

What it brought the water

to the eyes of the men?

Now the whole world had one language.

Thomas-John Parr

MoMA

As Picasso did it, the eyes
bigger than the head, it extends
for the spectator
the primitive bodies
Les Demoiselles,
I saw it with my wife
in the summer of 1991,
New York in suspension
below of the heat’s humidity,
lively and intact in a recurring wave
of air, the soul
establishes itself
in the girls of the Calle d'Avignon.

Thomas-John Parr

Literary Movements

«You send me your poems,
I'll send you mine.» Robert Creeley


We will change our poetry
as who exchange the same

complicity in the eyes,
a quick word

it will tend to leave the circle
will leave obtuse angles

and the tautology
of the four walls

We will change silence,
Small nothings with depths

You send me your poems,
especially those

to swim against the tide
I will send you mine.

J.T.Parreira

Paris, Winter 1994

Paris in that night had the light

distributed for the drops of rain

Sartre and Beauvoir were not there

In Café de Flore, three or four

spoons of sugar drowned

the bitter taste of the coffee, they drank it

first my eyes as a ritual, my lips later

In my language I would write

a previsible poem

Other times, Paris was a bluish air bit.

What it saw the Lot’s Wife

The ground did not receive
the rest of the Lot's wife: of foot
it stayed of foot to emerge
of the lowest molecules of salt
the sunk white dream in silence
did not have following morning, never
emerging of the dawn.


J.T.Parreira

The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

1920

The Smile of Mona Lisa

The smile of Gioconda to decorate
the museum, nobody
will mold it again
the bureaucratic smile
of Gioconda is a door
behind which does not have nothing
soul? landscapes? the silence
a navel of the soul
to smile for within.

J.T.Parreira