“My duty moves along with my song:I am I am not: that is my destiny.I exist not if I do not attend to the painof those who suffer: they are my pains.For I cannot be without existing for all,for all who are silent and oppressed,I come from the people and I sing for them:my poetry is song and punnishment.”

“Give me, for my life,all lives,give me all the painof everyone, I'm going to turn it into hope.Give me all the joys,even the most secret,because otherwisehow will these things be known?I have to tell them,give methe laborsof everyday,for that's what I sing.”

“LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more.I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.”

“Of everything I have seen, it's you I want to go on seeing: of everything I've touched, it's your flesh I want to go on touching. I love your orange laughter. I am moved by the sight of you sleeping. What am I to do, love, loved one? I don't know how others love or how people loved in the past. I live, watching you, loving you. Being in love is my nature.”

“Am I allowed to ask my bookwhether it's true I wrote it?”

“I don't know who it is who lives or dies, who rests or wakes, but it is your heart that distributes all the graces of the daybreak in my breast.”

“Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence, without you moving, slicing the noon like a blue flower, without you walking later through the fog and the cobbles, without the light you carry in your hand, golden, which maybe others will not see,which maybe no one knew was growing like the red beginnings of a rose. In short, without your presence: without your coming suddenly, incitingly, to know my life, gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind: since then I am because you are, since then you are, I am, we are, and through love I will be, you will be, we will be.”