Some migrations begin not with footsteps but with a sigh. The sea itself seemed to hold its breath as the Azoreans, heirs of wind and basalt, cast their fate toward invisible horizons. Between the furrows of the fields and the glimmer of distant stars, they carried an archipelago folded inside their chests—nine islands transformed into heartbeats. Every departure was a form of prayer, every wave a question, every return an echo of what could no longer be reclaimed. The Americas—real and imagined—became mirrors for our longing, vast continents of promise and forgetting. And in that space between memory and migration, poetry rose like a tide, giving voice to all that could not be said in the language of farewells.

In every departure, there is silence, a tremor in every horizon crossed. The story of Azorean emigration to the Americas is not only a historical fact—it is a pulse that beats through the collective memory of the islands. It inhabits our songs, our silences, our literature. The figure of the calafona, the emigrant who carries his island within him, stands as one of the most enduring symbols of the Azorean imagination. Emigration reshaped our relationship with the world; it taught us that even the smallest island contains an ocean of dreams. Our fascination with the “lost Californias of abundance” continues to echo through time, defining who we have become: an archipelago suspended between Europe and America—geographically close to one, emotionally tethered to the other.

Among the countless poets who have given voice to this transatlantic destiny, Pedro da Silveira emerges as one of the most profound interpreters of what it means to leave and to remain, to lose and to build anew. Few captured the existential depth of emigration as he did—the ache and the pride, the hunger and the hope. His poem Exodus is perhaps the most striking of all, both for its disciplined craft and for its unflinching honesty. It stands as a lyrical monument to an age of departures, a metaphor for a people who lived for centuries beneath what the poet called “a closed sky.”

Divided into three movements—departure, arrival, and integration—Exodus traces the emotional and historical geography of Azorean migration. The first part gives voice to those torn between leaving and staying; the second, to those who arrive and struggle to belong; the third, to those who stayed behind to build the Azores that others could only dream of. As Robert Frost once observed, “Poetry is when an emotion finds its thought and the thought finds its words.” Exodus fulfills this beautifully—it is both a poem and a chronicle, an elegy and a hymn. It narrates the odyssey of the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Azoreans who fled the hunger of the fields to forge new lives across the sea. Like the great migrations that shape the memory of every island, Exodus belongs not only to literature but to history itself.

Pedro da Silveira’s work deserves to be read in every Azorean classroom, for it tells our story with a precision that history books often neglect. As William Saroyan once wrote, “After all, today is forever, yesterday is still today, and tomorrow is already today.” In Exodus, time folds upon itself: the journeys of the past illuminate the departures of the present.

The exodus from the Azores was, indeed, a trial of faith. “After thirty days of sailing, / thirty nights of uncertainty and waiting, / we arrived in America.” These verses carry the weight of an entire generation’s periled long crossings, the storms, the prayers whispered into the dark. Pedro da Silveira understood that such journeys were born from necessity as much as from hope. As he wrote in Ilha, perhaps his most quoted poem on emigration, these were “hungry eyes” gazing toward the promise of bread and dignity. For those condemned by poverty or by fate, the dream itself became survival—what António Gedeão once said: “the dream commands life.”

In that dream lived the courage of thousands, including my own grandfather, who at the age of twenty, in 1910, followed the same path as countless others. As the poet tells us:

“Men and women disembarked in foreign ports—with only a dream in their eyes—
and our hunger for bread and distance crossed the mainland to the other ocean.”

These are the songs of those who departed and never returned. Many families still have cousins in America they have never met, names that exist only in the faint memories of grandparents long gone. The departures carried both hope and mourning, a silent pact between generations. The poet recalls the first arrivals: “there were only rivers, forests, and wild land.” The settlers entered a world still half-wild, where danger was as common as discovery.

Pedro da Silveira immortalizes those early Azorean footprints in California, a land that was not yet American but already alive with the possibility of rebirth. He reminds us of our presence before the Stars and Stripes flew—when the “tricolor flag of Mexico” waved over the hills and when Azoreans worked beside Sutter and Marshall, pioneers in the Gold Rush and innovators in the whaling industry. The founding of the Old Company of Portuguese Whalers in Monterey in 1855—by fifteen Azoreans who “sailed the sea as far as Bering”—is one such testament.

“Like the others, you turned your back on the sea,
bought a sieve, pickaxe, and shovel
and climbed the Sacramento to Sierras.
(Your life was worth
the minimum price of a bullet…)”

In these lines, Silveira fuses realism with lyricism, distilling history into image. California becomes the mirror of the Azorean condition—multicultural, rugged, alive with struggle. Azoreans, alongside Mexicans, Chinese, Italians, and Armenians, helped forge a state that today would rank as the world’s fifth-largest economy.

“Like you,
Yankees
and Mexicans, Indians, Italians,
Greeks, Chinese, Germans, Armenians, Jews, whites, blacks, yellows…
Cities were born
with their businesses, saloons
and dance halls, banks…
Scoundrels of all races have poisoned your blood.”

This vivid tableau reveals both the grandeur and the hardship of those days, the coexistence of various people, and the mingling of destinies. From North to South, in every direction, Azoreans left their mark.

“And you were a ferry boat crew member,
a dock loader, you opened roads
and railways, you were a lumberjack, a shepherd,
You worked on the ranches… You turned the wild land into a paradise.
Everywhere the mark of your footsteps: from San Diego to Eureka,
from Red Bluff to the Sierras,
from Monterey to Fresno…”

Few poems in Portuguese—or in any language—map geography so intimately with emotion. The precision with which Silveira names places reflects his awareness that poetry, unlike history, can reclaim what time erases. Paraphrasing Aristotle, poetry is finer and more philosophical than history, for it captures universal experiences and emotions, whereas history records only particulars. The poem Exodus is living proof. It gives us not mere names or dates, but the enduring image of the Azorean pioneer, the mark of your footsteps, pioneer.

In the end, Exodus becomes both lament and invocation. It reminds us that the Azores were built not only by those who stayed but also by those who left. The emigrants’ sweat, toil, and dreams enriched both sides of the Atlantic. As Silveira writes:

“To that land that was not yours, you gave the strength of your arms, you gave your sweat,
your ingenuity.
For that land that was not yours, you gave your blood generously.
And I gave you, O seed of worlds, your children.”

When Pedro da Silveira wrote these verses in 1952—before the Azorean Refugee Act and the exodus of the Family Reunification Act—he foresaw what generations would come to embody: that our descendants would speak louder than our longing for return. His final plea, woven through many of his poems, was clear: that the islands themselves must become lands of possibility, not waiting rooms for departure. “We cannot forever wait for the boat that will take us away,” he wrote in yet another magnificent poem: History.

Exodus is thus not only a poem—it is a map of belonging. A testament to the Azorean capacity to transform distance into continuity, exile into identity. It is a hymn to the endurance of those who built homes under foreign skies yet never ceased to dream of the hydrangea-blue of their origins. Pedro da Silveira reminds us that the Azores were also forged by those who left—simple people who carried the islands within them and, through labor and love, gave the Azores a wider horizon.

And so, in the longing for the bygone Americas, Exodus becomes the song of a people who learned to live between tides—forever departing, forever returning, forever belonging to both the sea and the shore. Its verses are the salt of our memory, the wind in our name, the unending bridge between what was and what will always be. In the end, the poem dissolves into the vastness, where islands are not merely fragments of land but living constellations of remembrance. The Azores become not a geography, but a rhythm of existence—sailing endlessly through the cosmos of human longing.

Diniz Borges