THE MOTHER MYTH
As many of you who read this will know, my mother is mine alone. In fact, I may not have been her only child, but I’m certainly the most beloved, the one she most secretly venerates, the light of her eyes, the supreme reason for her life. To be completely honest with myself, I believe there has always been a kind of forgetfulness in me, an art of erasing the second evidence of my creation, an impulse in every way similar to a refusal of the father’s existence. I am, therefore, a child only of her, with no memory of any other culture, no knowledge of the only science that would force me to admit a line of separation between faith and genetic theory, according to which no one is born this way, as unilaterally as I am, but always as a result of mating and the fusion between male and female. With me, however, all science can be a lie, and vice versa, because there are no signs or indications, or any other proof, of the father’s passage or presence in my nature. To put it more bluntly, I am the father of myself…

João de Melo
(in “Dicionário de Paixões”, 1994)

MOTHER
When I go down to the plain, the crows are blackness that portends pain. A bright light that lingers between hope and sadness in slow steps on the bereaved paths.
There’s too much dust on the way back, the shoeprints, the scattered thoughts, the fear of being unable to stay without you. There’s a mourning that isn’t mourning; it reflects life and the tragedy of existence. You loved me more than you spoke. You took such great care of me, perhaps to feel alive in the slow death that time calls for each of us.
It’s not always possible to exorcise the loneliness that runs through our veins with the blood of our grandparents. Your silence has my embrace, and I still keep the boyish scar that made you cry. I promise to be faithful to your dreams, even if others don’t understand.
We’ll stay together in the truths we’ve shared about love.
António Vilhena (from his Facebook page)

I went to see the sea
my father on a boat
my mother on land
and I went to see the sea
three silhouettes drawn on a
of graph paper
all of them walking
coming from the past to the present
glimpsing between the rays of the sun
the sinuous lines of the future
colored by the afternoon light
or dark as the pitch that covers the asphalt
in the chest the contained cry
to hide all the pain
that the world offers without mercy
without choosing the heart that hurts
my mother went to withdraw
between a drop of water and a veil of silence
my father drifted in the sea
later swallowed up by the geography of a wave
lined with white foam
and I was left with a rod to fish for dreams
with the lines that cross in the palms of my hands
bare of hope
and cold as the water of the coldest and deepest ocean

Victor de Lima Meireles
May 2024
MOTHER’S DAY AND THE DAY OF THE FEAST IN PONTA DELGADA OF SANTO CRISTO DOS MILAGRES

Translations by Diniz Borges, Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures, College of Arts and Humanities, California State University, Fresno.