Poet in Love

By Jorge Levi · translation of «Poeta Apaixonado»

My name is POET IN LOVE.

And it is not just a name; it is a condition of existence. I introduce myself this way because I never found a word more fitting to describe the strange adventure of being alive. I am a poet because I search for meaning where others see only events. I am in love because I understood, too early or too late, that to exist without passion is merely to cross time without truly inhabiting it.

I walk between questions that do not wish for an answer and answers that never satisfy the question. I dwell on the border between dream and consciousness, between what I was, what I wish to be and what I will never manage to understand in myself.

I write because silence, at times, weighs more than the universe. I love because finitude has made every encounter sacred. I think because doubt is the only safe homeland of the spirit. And I exist, in spite of everything, like someone contemplating the infinite through the small window of a human heart.

If I am asked who I am, I offer no biographies and no titles. I say only: I am a man who turned restlessness into language and language into shelter. I am someone who seeks, in every verse, to reconcile himself with the mystery of being born, loving, losing and dying.

My name is POET IN LOVE because I believe that passion is the most courageous form of philosophy and that poetry is the most beautiful attempt to dialogue with the absurdity of existence.

And while there is a question without an answer, a love without measure or a star not yet contemplated, I will go on introducing myself in the same way:

I am a POET IN LOVE.

And this is, at once, my identity, my doubt and my eternity.