There are weeks when literature merely accompanies the world, and there are weeks when literature becomes necessary to its survival. Today, Filamentos — Arts & Letters in the Azorean Diaspora begins one of those necessary journeys.

Over the next seven days, Words Against Darkness — Seven Azorean Women Poets Honored by the Cátedra Natália Correia will bring readers into the luminous presence of seven women whose poetry emerged from the Atlantic islands yet spoke always to the wider human condition. Their words crossed solitude, exile, memory, rebellion, tenderness, and freedom with the rare courage of those who understood that poetry is not an escape from history, but a way of confronting it.

At a moment when the world again trembles beneath intolerance, war, cultural amnesia, and the exhaustion of public language, these Azorean voices return with renewed urgency. They remind us that literature can still serve as conscience, refuge, resistance, and moral imagination. Their islands were never prisons of geography, but observatories of humanity.

Presented by the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute at California State University, Fresno, through the Cátedra Natália Correia, this series also continues the enduring belief that culture must travel beyond borders, beyond nostalgia, and beyond silence itself. Through these seven poets, Filamentos invites readers into what might be called an Atlantic republic of words — a space where poetry becomes a bridge between generations, continents, and fragile human hopes.

For even in difficult times, language still carries light.

TODAY WE HONOR THE POET AVELINA DA SILVEIRA

There are poets who write from the surface of language, and there are poets who write as if language itself were a wound, a tide, a fever rising from the deepest chambers of memory. In these poems by Avelina da Silveira, gathered from an upcoming collection that already feels destined to occupy a singular place within contemporary Azorean literature, the reader encounters not merely verses, but incantations—lyrical acts of reclamation uttered against silence, domestication, war, and forgetting. Her poetry does not ask permission to exist. It arrives like sea weather: fierce, luminous, ancestral.

Throughout these poems, madness becomes not pathology but liberation, a sacred refusal of the narrow architectures imposed upon women by society, religion, and habit. The “mad women” of Avelina da Silveira’s imagination are not broken beings but visionary presences, descendants of mermaids, witches, birds, and primordial mothers. They belong not to the ordinary world of routines and obedience, but to an older, more elemental order where intuition is wisdom and emotion is a form of resistance. In her hands, the feminine voice becomes tidal, volcanic, untamed. One hears echoes of Clarice Lispector, of Natália Correia, of women writers who transformed language into an act of insurgency against mediocrity and submission.

Yet this poetry is also profoundly Azorean. The sea here is not metaphor alone; it is ontology, memory, inheritance. The islands emerge as spaces suspended between myth and geopolitics, between ancient gods and modern drones. Avelina da Silveira understands that insularity is not isolation but heightened consciousness. Her islands remember what the modern world attempts to erase: the sacredness of collective memory, the whispers within shells, the ancestral dialogue between cliffs, wind, and human longing. Even when confronting contemporary violence—the terrifying image of drones crossing the skies of an Atlantic island on their way to distant wars—her poetry refuses cynicism. Instead, she insists upon the moral imagination: the belief that poetry must continue to defend tenderness, mothers, tea shared in peace, the fragile dignity of human life.

There is in these poems a remarkable fusion of lyrical beauty and ethical urgency. Avelina da Silveira writes with the cadence of someone who knows that language itself can become an act of shelter against brutality. Her verses move fluidly between mysticism and protest, between sensuality and metaphysical yearning, between personal affirmation and collective grief. She reminds us that poetry still possesses the power to name the beginning of things again—to recover lost vocabularies of compassion, freedom, sensuality, and belonging.

In an age increasingly governed by noise, speed, and spiritual exhaustion, these poems dare to speak in another register: the register of fire, salt, memory, and prophecy. They invite us not simply to read, but to remember what it means to remain human while the world forgets.

All three of the following poems are from an upcoming bilingual poetry book, Loucas São as Mulheres como Eu by Avelina da Silveira.

I have taken refuge in madness because I have no choice
But the so-called middle ground of the ordinary state of affairs.
I want to see new things—and I will only be able to do so
If I am no longer afraid of madness.
Clarisse Lispector

Mad are women like me,
Effervescent birds in search of the ineffable
That I find swirling beneath the full moon
When the night is warm
And the sea calls the mermaid.
Mad are women like me,
With hearts ablaze.
They say I am too emotional,
I who conquer the shards of the mirror
And extend my hand that turns into a wing,
Bird-woman, assertive sorceress.
I am not made for ordinary things.
What does the priest say about the gospel?

Or the daily domestic routine of the home.
Crazy women like me
Defy the mundane, the vulgar
Because we came from the depths of the sea
And there we found our apogee.
At night, in silence, while the world sleeps, we light a candle and a
stick of incense, giving thanks for the madness that, in this life, has
granted us so much.

I have not yet received the memory of what we were
only the name of the sea shall return to the blazing field
of the voice
Ângela de Almeida

We have forgotten the ancient gods who populated
Our days of wild sap, on the threshold of the days of reason.
We left, in a corner, looms of memories and ancient songs
That spoke of the beginning of things and of the birds that flew
High above, tracing the territory where we spread the song
Of being naked, whole, without shame and without shelter.
We were like that, mythical, primordial, our own ancestors.
We have lost the memory of the whispers coming from the shells
That bore the name of the sea, the beech trees, and the wind
So that from the trees, hills, and cliffs we might build cathedrals.
But there is still time; there is still the scent of the sea, foam, and
breath
To find our voice in the crashing of the waves against the wind,
To rise, and with fire in our throats, rediscover

The words that name the beginning of things and of affections,
There is still time to be whole and return to the name of the sea.

There are drones over my island

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