Each day, a page. Each page, a moon. Each moon, Álamo.

Picture from the symposium Filamentos da Herança Atlântica-Tulare (1998)

ode of sea and wind
1.
by the sea and the light rain
I lament this hunger of warships.
I am from the naked island
the island discovered by fog sails
on a morning of nothingness.
at every point
a shadow dances the dance
that I did not have
in wave steps.
i have a dress of foam
with limpet shells
and between my fingers
of mist and moon
I sift the clarity that falls from my eyes.
2.
I am from a naked island
discovered by a man
covered with insomnia who
for lack of anything better pissed this bay
and lacking a woman
begat me this womb.
in my womb
fish fit, and men from boats
that catch what I created
without sowing
as a good Portuguese standard that I am.
and I want nothing more than
this stillness – alive and throbbing
grounded in every hour
that I release to the wind
as a message from my
echoes to the infinite.

3.
I never cry on
my naked island discovered
by the ignorance of a columbus
who didn’t study finance
nor legislation
and left me the will for the
non-existence of bread.
I sowed everything!
I sowed all of myself!
and
when I harvest my hands full of thistles
I drink the salt of the sea that
surrounds and suffocates me.
I enter church on Sundays
with the best smile I have left
and give off firecrackers of rage
when I enter the feast
or when on the other side
the boat arrives
with verdant pine-green news.
truly
my island is a plate
of lentils in that biblical one of the others.
4.
and my naked island discovered
by a man’s weariness
in a seagull’s scratch
is only this strength of earth sweat and fire
(incongruity of hunger and jealousy);
it is only this certainty
of knowing myself in the backside of the world.

a)
but resignation exists.
in the center of this oceanic desert
I know that I die with
mortal sin stamped on my forehead
circumcised by the tides
of sulphureous smells
in a constant pursuit
of extinct volcanoes or deep hells.
b)
myself I will die
I shall die on a moonlit morning
and plowing the earth victimized
by the just revolution of the worms
to whom I pledge from now on
all my support as a citizen.
5.
but
bury me on the naked island
on this island discovered
by an inch of chance
when the man bored of fishing
put out to sea his boat of boredom, heat and
wind.
make me want to rot
with my war boots.

From the book Through the Walls of Solitude