that portrait of yours that everyone knows,
in which your fair head awakens and blooms
over a modest piece of cloth.
That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices in your old Florence.
(No, no, Galileo! I did not say Holly Office.
I said Gallery of the Offices.)
That portrait in the Gallery of the Offices in ornate Florence.
Do you remember? The Vecchio bridge, the Loggia, the Piazza della Signoria…
I know… I know…
The sweet banks of the Arno river at the lacklustre hours of melancholy.
How I long for those, Galileo Galilei!
Look. Do you know? There in Florence
a right hand finger of yours is kept in a reliquary.
Word of honour that it is!
How the world goes around!
Perhaps there are even people thinking
that you have entered the calendar.
for the brightness of the things you gave me.
I,
and how many millions of men like myself
who were enlightened by you,
I was going to swear — what a nonsense, Galileo!
— and I would swear betting my own head
without the least hesitation —
that the bodies fall the faster
the heavier they are.
For is it not evident, Galileo?
Who believes that a bolder falls
as fast as a shirt button or as a beach pebble?
Such was the intelligence that God gave us.
I was now recalling, Galileo,
that scene in which you were sitting on a stool
and had before you
a bar of learned men, rigid, wearing toga and hood,
looking at you severely.
They were all preaching to you,
that how it was possible that a man of your age
and of your condition
had become a menace
to Humanity
and to Civilization.
You, embarrassed and culpable, bit your lips in silence,
and examined, full of piety,
the impenetrable faces of those wise men in a row.
Your eyes used to the observation of satellites and of stars
descended from their heights
and landed, like bewildered birds — I almost can see them —
on the pregnant faces of those most reverend creatures.
And you kept saying yes to all, yes sir, that all was exactly
as their highnesses desired,
and you would say that the Sun was squared and the Moon pentagonal
and that the stars danced and sang
hymns to the universal harmony at midnight.
And you avowed that you would never repeat,
not even to yourself, in the own intimacy of your thoughts, free and calm,
those abominable heresies
you taught and described
for the eternal damnation of your soul.
O Galileo!
Your learned judges, great lords of this tiny world, hardly know
that as they were, stiff in their armchairs,
were running and rolling through space
at thirty kilometres per second.
You were the one who knew, Galileo Galilei.
Hence your merciful eyes,
hence your heart filled with compassion,
compassion for those men who do not need to suffer, fortunate men
whom God freed from searching for the truth.
Hence, stoically, meekly,
your resistance to all tortures,
to all anguishes, to all hindrances,
while they, from the height of their inaccessible heights,
have been falling,
falling,
falling,
falling,
always falling,
and always,
uninterruptedly,
in the direct reason of the square of the times.
___________________
Poem for Galileo (1982)
by António Gedeão (Rómulo de Carvalho, 1906-1977)
translated from the original in Portuguese by António Dinis Lopes
