Ferreira Gullar #3

[The first is one of the best political poems ever written. Check out how Gullar uses the clearest, simplest language to demystify commodity fetishism. Very few poets try — or manage — to do things like this. Even fewer imagine they could.]

Sugar

The white sugar
I’m about to use
to sweeten my coffee
this morning in Ipanema
wasn’t made by me
and no miracle made it show up in my sugar-bowl.

I look at it, so pure
and friendly to the palate,
like a kiss from a girl, water
on the skin, a flower
that melts in your mouth.
But this sugar wasn’t made by me.

This sugar came
from the corner market, and Oliveira,
the shopkeeper,
didn’t make it.
This sugar came
from a mill in Pernambuco
and the miller didn’t make it, either.

This sugar used to be cane, and cane
comes from huge canefields
that don’t sprout by chance
in some valley’s welcoming lap.

In places far from here,
where there are no hospitals,
where there are no schools,
men who don’t know how to read
and die of hunger
at 27
planted and cut the cane
that was made into this sugar.

In dark mills
men with hard
and sour lives
produced the pure white sugar
I’m about to use
to sweeten my coffee
this morning
in Ipanema.

August 1964

By flower shops and shoe stores, bars,
        markets, boutiques,
I travel
        in a bus on the Estrada de Ferro-Leblon line. I’m
        coming home from work, the night half over, and I’m tired of lies.
The bus shakes. Goodbye Rimbaud,
lilac clock, concretismo,
neo-concretismo, my youthful fictions, goodbye
        to the life
        I’m buying on time from the owners of the world.
        Weighed down by taxes, poetry suffocates —
now poetry’s being interrogated by the military police.
        I’m saying goodbye to illusions but not to the world. But not to life,
                my stronghold, my kingdom.
        From unfair wages,
        from unfair punishment,
        from humiliation, torture,
        and terror . . .
let’s take something from all that
and make an artifact

a poem
a flag