Three Poems by Januario Esteves

 

Caelum

 

We had predicted the memory revisited through

a visualization that brought us to this world now

in new biological tissues that allow us to

live on the arid surface that welcomes us in Caeli

in a long summer of ten years and so many of winter

we travelled the great craters that exhale acids

spongy dunes next to lakes of liquid metal

that boils in multicoloured spurts of lit odour

and we planned to terraform the vast surrounding area

in a heliotropic garden of sunflowers in circadian rhythm

drawing energy from the white mother star that gushes its

wind over the cocoons we brought to life as it happens

on the biological clock parallel to the heyday of the two moons

we recreated the first materialized impulse in vitro

in the critical reasoning of our education, we unveil

the sparkling object that falls in love with our desire.

 

 

Perseus

 

That day Heaven carried a meteor shower

coming from the spiral arms of the star that eclipses

and we sought refuge on the edge of the foam lakes

of Sissi in Berehynia and because the days there are short

we spent long hours enraptured by the musk odour

of the greenish-orange atmosphere like a northern lights

and then inside our spaceship we said prayers

each other in a sharing of divinized emotions

by the galactic wind that wrapped us fearfully

of the long parsecs of the wandering odyssey that we started

moving in space with the speed of thought

look for the spark lodged in the great attractor

where decoherence is no longer an impractical thing

infinite values of magnitude to have physical meaning

in the residual substance of cosmic radiation that calls us

and forces us fearless adventurers to have a destination.

 

 

Libra

 

The pure young woman was like a blooming rose, hot and silky

vehement and sad, sweet and bitter seeking the sun in a metaphase

of emotions in a series of scales next to the pillar of memory, at the root

of tenderness, of loving justice of lucid temperance that exudes

his sighs for the chaos that rose in exasperated existence

floating in a personal orbit that only she executes, only she witnesses

disgusted with the evil and brutality of humanity, she is alone

watching the twilight that slowly fades in your memory

in an approach halo holding its rays like a torch

she looks for the symbol of just perfection at the limit of temperance

in the precession of the equinoxes she exhales her sweet breath in the dirty

mantle of the night that covers the inhabited areas illuminating

the agency, holding the world’s offspring with invisible rays

in succession continues the mornings that unfold in the spell.

 

 

Januário Esteves was born in Coruche (1960) and was raised near Costa da Caparica,

Portugal. He graduated in electromechanical installations, uses the pseudonym Januanto

and writes poetry since the age of 16. In 1987 he published poems in the Jornal de Letras, and participated over the years in some collective publications.