The Last Shepherds

Shepherds of the Serra de Estrela mountains have been declining in numbers, suggesting their way of life is slowly dying out & threatening the production of Portugal’s traditional cheese made from goats’s milk.

1.

Obrigardo os ultimos pastores,

your regard

smouldering like scorched eucalyptus

out of thick, black sunglasses.

Obrigardo Old Europe.

 

2.

I have given

and that is the only phrase,

a cork tree from which poetry

has been stripped away, other,

I don’t know,

indelible things whose valour

will never be retrieved.

 

I’ll be Portuguese about this.

Write about them anyway.

 

3.

If a wolf came down right now

scattering thirty or forty goats,

scaring a couple straying 

from their main group,

 

he, wearing a brown shirt,

she with running black hair,

throwing arms around him without warning,

alarming the wild flowers they crush

and were investigating

it would not be poetry.

 

I need an ultimos pastore to make up the numbers.

There is one walking

on a circuit clear of the couple 

who pay no attention.

 

He does not wear his white cap

yet cotton blue shirt and shoulder bag

fit into the landscape just as well.

The ultimos pastore is not the poetry.

 

The couple go down

to the lake called Albfeira do Roxo.

A glass melted edge

submerges those same flowers

the couple tried to identify.

 

Albfeira do Roxo is not the poetry.

 

I notice another ultimos pastore

wearing an orange jumpsuit

and with a larger herd.

So now you know

I would not be giving this account further credibility 

since it is said in Portugal,

herding is a dying art

and why would an ultimos pastore

want to wear an orange jumpsuit anyway?

 

He was not concerned with us.

His goat herd is not the poetry.

 

By deleting all this and us

the describer, 

we are left with the resemblance of poetry.

How fascinating it is

to be left with what began that exactly.