Poetry Sunday: Things by Jorge Luis Borges

Earlier this month, I featured a poem by Donald Hall called "The Things" for my Poetry Sunday post. One of my blogger friends, Carmen, commented on it and directed my attention to this poem by Jorge Luis Borges. It is on much the same theme - the things with which we surround ourselves, the things that fill up our lives, and the things that will inevitably be left behind when we are gone. Things that will "never know that we are gone."

Things

by Jorge Luis Borges


My walking-stick, small change, key-ring,
The docile lock and the belated
Notes my few days left will grant
No time to read, the cards, the table,
A book, in its pages, that pressed
Violet, the leavings of an afternoon
Doubtless unforgettable, forgotten,
The reddened mirror facing to the west
Where burns illusory dawn. Many things,
Files, sills, atlases, wine-glasses, nails,
Which serve us, like unspeaking slaves,
So blind and so mysteriously secret!
They’ll long outlast our oblivion;
And never know that we are gone.

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