Finding a New Poet: To Accept the Day - Halfway to a House - by Rosa Alice Branco

The view from Anam Cara

It is indeed a grand morning when one awakes to the discovery of a new poet. Thank you Joele Biele for introducing me to Portugese poet Rosa Alice Branco - her use of syntax startles me most (in a good way) and her building of intimacy;  both make me wonder how I could have not known her work before just now. What a pleasure!

Mornings on the Ground
Rosa Alice Branco


To accept the day.  What will come.
To pass through more streets than houses,
more people than streets.  To pass through
skin to the other side. While I make
and unmake the day.  Your heart
sleeps with me.  It wraps me up at night
and the mornings are cold when I get up.
And I'm always asking where you are and why
the streets no longer are rivers.  At times
a drop of water falls to the ground
as if it were a tear.  At times
there isn't ground enough to soak it up.


--tr. Alexis Levitin, New European Poets, Miller & Prufer, eds

Halfway to a House

I take light from the closet drawers. The first day
of fall. And all those years at the bottom.
Before, it wasn't me. It was a house under construction.
I before myself. Now I dismantle the summer,
dresses flying, naked feet beside a dress.
Time loses itself in the change of the seasons,
but in this loss someone exists in me.
A voice laughs deep within the closet.
The sun so low, in the bottom drawer.

--tr. Alexis Levitin