Writer: Antonio Porcia... !!..

A Man of Truth, must be a Man of Care !
~Mahatma Gandhi

Voces (1943)
Translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

A door opens to me. I go in and am faced with a hundred closed doors.

He who holds me by a thread is not strong; the thread is strong.

My great day came and went, I do not know how. Because it did not pass through dawn when it came, nor through dusk when it went.

You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.
I would go to heaven, but I would take my hell; I would not go alone.
My heaviness comes from the heights.
Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?
We become aware of the void as we fill it.
Because they know the name of what I am looking for, they think they know what I am looking for !
A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.
Before I travelled my road I was my road.

When I die, I will not see myself die, for the first time.

***Antonio Porchia (November 13, 1886 - November 9, 1968) was an Italian poet. He was born in Italy but, after the death of his father in 1911, moved to Argentina. He wrote a Spanish book entitled Voces ("Voices"), a book of aphorisms. It has since been translated into English (by W.S. Merwin), French, and German. A very influential, yet extremely succinct writer. Some critics have paralleled his work to japanese Haiku and found many similarities with a number of Zen schools of thought.