FROM PORT TO PORT – SUMMER WINTER

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

 

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;

 

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

 

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare

 

 

SUMMER WINTER

Summer opens the mouth of the sky

and swallows the clock frozen in seconds

the hours drip like ripe lettuce

and climb onto the children’s shoulders

like wings of sweaty butterflies

 

In the yard, the sun hangs its coats

sniffling on the antennas of the houses

ants study maps of sugar

to cross the desert of noon

and a goldfish learns to breathe fire

inside the aquarium of clouds

then winter arrives riding

a horse made of glass

with small cold moons in its pockets

and sows silence across the rooftops

 

The trees wear elegant skeletons

and they converse in a misty tongue

summer laughs with black grape teeth

and spreads sheets of light over the asphalt

winter replies with letters of frost

stuffed with invisible deliriums

in white handwriting on window glass

between the two, the world is a seesaw

on one side, incandescent cicadas

who sing daring boleros

on the other, crows embroidering snow in the wind

 

Winter dressed the night in coats of silence

and blew snow onto the eyelids of the sun

while barefoot Summer

threw ripe mangoes at the melting clock

 

“I am the one who keeps dreams in the frost,”

growled the cold, with breath of broken glass

and the heat answered in feverish sunflowers,

“But I am the one who teaches the blood to sing.”

 

We, tightrope walkers of skin and memory,

drink glasses of sun with cubes of lunar ice

while the seasons contend for

hearts

half fire,

half crystal.

 

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18, in https://peregrinacultural.com/2019/08/04/traducao-uma-coisa-complicada-variacoes-do-soneto-18-de-shakespeare, translated by Carlos de Oliveira (Brazil/Portugal).

Summer Winter, text partially generated by AI and subsequently edited by the authors.

Texts and images by Madeleine Muller and Francisco Mesquita.

Francisco Mesquita & Madeleine Müller

Published on 26 March 2026