The Art of Poetry, by Jorge Luis Borges

Love and the poet, by  Bryce Cameron Liston

The Art of Poetry 

To gaze at a river made of time and water 

and remember Time is another river. 

To know we stray like a river 

and our faces vanish like water. 

To feel that waking is another dream 

that dreams of not dreaming and that the death 

we fear in our bones is the death 

that every night we call a dream. 

To see in every day and year a symbol 

of all the days of man and his years, 

and convert the outrage of the years 

into a music, a sound, and a symbol. 

To see in death a dream, in the sunset 

a golden sadnesssuch is poetry, 

humble and immortal, poetry, 

returning, like dawn and the sunset. 

Sometimes at evening there's a face 

that sees us from the deeps of a mirror. 

Art must be that sort of mirror, 

disclosing to each of us his face. 

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders, 

wept with love on seeing Ithaca, 

humble and green. Art is that Ithaca, 

a green eternity, not wonders. 

Art is endless like a river flowing, 

passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same 

inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same 

and yet another, like the river flowing. 

Jorge Luis Borges