Poems for all seasons

Over at Overexcitable, it seems to be harvest season. The time when all your hard work pays off in more bounty than you expected. And she is sharing the good cheer with a poem for all the times it goes right.

In response to Jo's poem, here is the poem for my season. It is on my Netvibes portal page.

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the woman who wants to live is the woman in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death, but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don't turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what's alive in the furrow, what's dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds,
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

-Miguel de Unamuno
Translated by R.B.

Via my favorite poetry anthology The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart; poems for men. (Ah well.)