'I'd have had verse be like that...'

 Today being National Poetry Day, I decided to celebrate by making another Blindfold Poetry Selection. This time, the volume my groping hand alighted on was Fernando Pessoa's Selected Poems (Penguin, 1982, translated by Jonathan Griffin), and the poem it fell open at was this short, pungent lyric written in 1932 in the persona of Ricardo Reis...

I Stick to Facts

I stick to facts. Just what I feel, I think. 
Words   are ideas.
Rustling, the stream passes – and what does not pass, 
Which is ours, not the stream's.
I'd have had verse be like that: mine is alien,
Something I too read.

Pessoa, a fixture in the cafés and restaurants of Lisbon, died having published almost nothing: as John Gray wrote, 'no one has led an ineffectual life as intrepidly as Pessoa did, or written about it with such insight and charm'. Happily he left behind him a treasure trove of highly distinctive poetry and prose, written  mostly in his four personae – Alberto Caiero, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and, yes, Fernando Pessoa.