Skip to main content

Beyond The Bend In The Road

· 2 min read
Manu Magalhães
Curious Cat
quotes icon by Michel Rojas, The Noun Project

Beyond the bend in the road
There may be a well, and there may be a castle,
And there may be just more road.
I don’t know and don’t ask.
As long as I’m on the road that’s before the bend
I look only at the road before the bend,
Because the road before the bend is all I can see.
It would do me no good to look anywhere else
Or at what I can’t see.
Let’s pay attention only to where we are.
There’s only enough beauty in being here and not somewhere else.
If there are people beyond the bend in the road,
Let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.
That, for them, is the road.
If we’re to arrive there, when we arrive there we’ll know.
For now we know only that we’re not there.
Here there’s just the road before the bend, and before the bend
There’s the road without any bend.

Pessoa, Fernando. Para Além da Curva da Estrada / Beyond The Bend In The Road. Translated by Richard Zenith. In: “A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems”, Penguin Books, 2006