If life is a mixture of drained rivers / which carry to the sea echoes of water, / we are nothing but shadows – / reflected lights of dead bodies without no possible outlet or shore. (From The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 37)

"Voices"

Ideal and dearly beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

And for a moment with their echo other echoes
return from the first poetry of our lives — like music that extinguishes the far-off night.

The infinite is inside / our eyes; / not outside, not in the things / of this world, / but in their shadows. / Night, Death, Blinking, / take us through the universe again, / out of time. (From: The Poetry of Menotti Lerro, p. 40)

Translation: Naught else but empty shadows are our dreams,
Reflected from the day’s imaginings.

Ideal voices and beloved
of those who have died, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.
Sometimes, within our dreams, they speak;
sometimes the mind can hear them in our thoughts.
And with their sound for an instant return
sounds from the early poetry of our lifelike music in the night, faraway, that fades.

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! — yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever;

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. — A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. — One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! — For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

El sueño de la noche no nos pertenece. No es nuestra propiedad. Para nosotros es un raptor, el más desconcertante de los raptores: nos arrebata nuestro ser. Las noches no tienen historia. No se ligan unas a otras. Y cuando se ha vivido mucho, cuando ya se han vivido unas veinte mil noches, nunca sabemos en qué noche antigua, muy antigua, hemos partido hacia el sueño. La noche no tiene futuro. Sin duda, hay noches menos negras en las que nuestro ser del días vive aún bastante como para negociar con sus recuerdos.