18 linhas de Berryman

 Dois poemas brutais, nas suas habituais 18 linhas, de John Berryman, retirados do livro "The Dream Songs" (Prémio Pulitzer Poesia em 1965), cuja vida, pessoal e literária, gira em torno do suicídio...

"145"

Also I love him: me he's done no wrong

for going on forty years -- forgiveness time --

I touch now his despair,

he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower

but he did not swim out with me or my brother

as he threatened --

a powerful swimmer, to    take one of us along

as company in the defeat sublime,

freezing my helpless mother:

he only, very early in the morning,

rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window

and did what was needed.

I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong

& so undone. I've always tried. I -- I'm

trying to forgive

whose frantic passage, when he could not live

an instant longer, in the summer dawn

left Henry to live on.

"235"

Tears Henry shed for poor old Hemingway

Hemingway in despair, Hemingway at the end,

the end of Hemingway,

tears in a diningroom in Indiana

and that was years ago, before his marriage say,

God to him no worse luck send.

Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides.

It all depends on who you’re the father of

if you want to kill yourself-

a bad example, murder of oneself,

the final death, in a paroxysm, of love

for which good mercy hides?

A girl at the door: ‘A few coppers pray’

But to return, to return to Hemingway

that cruel & gifted man.

Mercy! my father; do not pull the trigger

or all my life I’ll suffer from your anger

killing what you began.