Portuguese Poets on Christmas, Time, and Becoming

Reinterpreted in English by Diniz Borges

Christmas is not a date.
It is the instant when time hesitates
and language begins again.

Introduction

Christmas, in these poems, is not a fixed day on the calendar but a recurring disturbance in time. It is an arrival that resists closure, a moment when history loosens its grip and the world becomes briefly unfinished.

Across generations of Portuguese poets—believers and skeptics, celebrants and dissenters—Christmas emerges not as doctrine or décor, but as event: something that happens in breath, in silence, in the fragile architecture of words. It occurs in solitude as much as in gathering, in doubt as much as in faith, in exile as much as at home.

Reinterpreted into English, these poems are offered as crossings rather than replicas—acts of listening that allow Portuguese lyric memory to speak anew within another language. Addressed especially to the Portuguese Diaspora, yet open to all readers, this series invites us to inhabit Christmas as a continual becoming: a season that does not repeat, but is always being born.

Christmas, a reinterpretation of a poem by Manue Alegre

It happened—
wind-stitched, rain-scribed—
it happened.
Figures rising along the slope of music,
a wave rehearsing its own brightness,
words leaping like hesitant fish
or unclaimed hands—
a sob, a rhyme,
guitars tuning the air to salt.
(Sea or sound—no difference.)
And it happened.
In the wind’s broken syntax.
In the rain’s long parenthesis.
It happened.

In your mouth—
threshold of a half-uttered world;
on your face—
where light considers its return;
along your body—
the dreamed geography where time folds.
There it happened.
In the slow ceremonies of your sleep,
in the quiet liturgy of your gestures
(liturgia, liturgia),
in the flinching radiance of your eyes,
in silences without border or bottom.
Your night held it.
Your day inherited it.
In the sun that rises from your breath,
it happened.

A breath—
but shaped like a psalm;
a psalm—
but trembling like nostalgia.
All time condensed:
a single metrical instant,
the line balanced on its own edge.
A tremor.
A startled pivot.
And still it happened.

Rain-washed city,
corners rinsed of certainty—
it happened there too.
In the accident, the almost,
a swirl of murky water turning upon itself,
the wind agitating the incomplete map of the day.
Christmas, they whispered—
or was it only the wind bending the syllables?
Either way, it was happening.

As if inside the word
a wild rose unfolded its impossible geometry—
it happened.
And December, contrary to knowledge, bloomed.
A volcano breached the ordinary.
And on your body: the flower, the lava.
In the lava: the rose, the word.
In the word: the world opening again.

Time concentrated,
shaped to a single instant:
the birth of poetry.

Mission

To bring Portuguese poetry into English as a living art of renewal—
reinterpreting Christmas not as inherited certainty, but as an ongoing human question shaped by time, memory, and voice.

This series seeks to honor the poets’ original intensities while allowing their words to breathe within the cadence and imagination of contemporary English, offering each poem as a threshold rather than a monument.

We envision Christmas as a shared human interval—a space where language, history, and vulnerability converge.

A Season That Keeps Being Born affirms poetry as a form of passage: between generations, between homelands and Diaspora, between belief and doubt, between what has been lost and what might still arrive. By presenting one poem at a time, we restore to Christmas its deepest power—not spectacle, but attention; not certainty, but renewal. Here, poetry does not commemorate the past. It opens the present.