When Azorean poetry speaks again, in another tongue

CHILD WITHOUT A GIFT

There are no dolls in Gaza,
no paper clothed in color,
no ribbons to cradle joy—
only dust,
ancestral dust that clings to skin like sorrow,
an inheritance of silence
that even time cannot absolve.

Dawn quivers on the horizon,
and the sky convulses—
not with the hymn of birds,
but with the iron breath of engines
that no longer remember the syllables of God.

The child does not know the word war;
he whispers only, “Where is my mom?”
he murmurs, “I am thirsty,”
and softly, “When can I go home?”
Home—now a ghost of walls and wind,
a silence kneeling among the ashes.

On the day he was to be reborn into another year—
or would have been, had calendars not perished—
there was no cake,
no flame,
only the brittle cry of shattering glass,
and the world imploding
in a corner strewn with broken toys.

His father, hands emptied of the world,
gazes upon him
as if seeking forgiveness from creation itself
for a grief he did not author.

Far away, voices fracture the air,
others cry,
others vanish into static—
but no one hears them
from this side of the luminous screen.
Language collapses beneath such sorrow,
and the cameras avert their gaze
when blood begins to speak.

The child cradles a stone—
not as weapon,
but as relic:
the last breath of a brother,
a grandfather,
a classroom once alive with names
before the wall became scripture and grave.

He does not know the word future,
but he has mastered the lexicon of fear:
fear wears a uniform of dust and light,
flies across the unblinking firmament,
and speaks in tongues
that decree silence as law.

His mother sleeps in a hospital
that has forgotten the meaning of mercy—
now only a dwelling for ghosts of breath.
She smiles through her pain
and whispers, “Close your eyes, my son,
and imagine the sea.”

But the sea is a wall of salt,
the sea is echo and elegy,
the sea is a promise whispered to the dead.

He closes his small eyes,
and dreams—
a gift:
a book,
a red balloon,
a laughter unbroken by the siren’s cry.

When he opens them,
he sees only the sky—
that Gaza sky,
still burning.

Raquel André Machado
Ponta Delgada, July 26, 2025

(Translated by Diniz Borges)

The most recent book of poetry by Raquel Machado

The second voice of the sea…

Across the wide Atlantic, the sea carries more than tides — it carries the whispered dreams of islands. The Second Voice of the Sea gathers the poetry of the Azores and releases it anew in English, so each verse may breathe again in another tongue. Through the alchemy of translation, this Filamentos project from Bruma Publications at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute, Fresno State, preserves the winds, the salt, and the saudade of the archipelago, offering them to readers far from its shores. Here, the ocean becomes a page, and the page, an endless sea.

This project is also sponsored by the Luso-American Education Foundation.