The best poems by Cesare Pavese

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When death comes, it will have your eyes-
This death that is always with us,
From morning till evening, sleepless,
Deaf, like an old remorse
Or some senseless bad habit. Your eyes
Will be a pointless word,
A stifled scream, a silence;
The way they appear to you each morning,
When you lean over, alone,
Into the mirror. Sweet hope,
That day we too shall know
That you are life and you are nothingness.
For each of us, death has a face.
When death comes, it will have your eyes.
It will be like quitting some bad habit,
Like seeing a dead face
Resurface out of the mirror,
Like listening to shut lips.
We'll go down into the vortex in silence.

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I'll wander the streets till I'm dead tired,
I'll learn to live alone and look each passing face
straight in the eye and still be what I am.
This coolness ascending in me, searching through my veins,
is an awakening each morning that I've never felt
so real -except that I feel stronger
than my body, and a colder shiver comes each morning now.
The mornings I had at twenty are now far: away.
And tomorrow, twenty-one: tomorrow I'll go out in tile streets.
I remember every stone, and the layers of the sky.
From tomorrow people will start seeing me,
I'll walk straight, and perhaps I'll pause
to see myself in windows. There were mornings once
when I was young and didn't know it, didn't even know
that who was passing by was me - a woman, mistress
of herself. The scrawny girl I used to be
was awakened by a weeping that went on for years.
Now it's as if that grieving never was.
And all I want are colours. Colours don't weep,
they're like an awakening: tomorrow colours
will return. Every woman will go out into the street,
each body a colour - even the children.
And this body of mine, dressed after so much paleness
in a frivolous red, will repossess its life.
I'll feel glances slide over me
and I'll know I'm me: a sidelong look
and I'll see I'm there, among people. Each new morning
I'll go out into the streets and look for colours.

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Dawn's faint breath
breathes with your mouth
at the ends of empty streets.
Gray light your eyes,
sweet drops of dawn
on dark hills.
Your steps and breath
like the wind of dawn
smother houses.
The city shudders,
Stones exhale--
you are life, an awakening.
Star lost
in the light of dawn,
trill of the breeze,
warmth, breath--
the night is done.
You are light and morning.