What shall we do, poets, with this Tenth of June, set among tables of abundance, between platters of memory and cups overflowing with nostalgia? What shall we do with the hands of language when they return empty from the orchards of remembrance, their fingers still scented with fruit they can no longer reach?

For to be born is to learn the grammar of salt. To grow is to give names to waves. To love is to hear distant harbors calling through the darkness. And to die is to leave a word behind, wandering the world in search of its sea.

What shall we do, poets, with the man in the portrait, with the face worn thin by centuries of framing, with the gaze that follows us through ceremonies, schoolbooks, speeches, and official commemorations? What shall we do with the missing eye, that legendary absence drifting among fogs, shipwrecks, and calendars yellowed by longing? Who stole the other half? Or perhaps it was never lost. Perhaps it still sails beyond the edge of maps, crossing impossible horizons and lighting small fires of wind inside the syllables of dawn. For a poet is never whole. Part of him remains forever where language has not yet arrived.

To read is to open a window upon the impossible. To forget is to close the horizon from within. Every forgotten book is a harbor abandoned before the ships return.

What shall we do, poets, with the song no one seeks anymore—not because it is distant, but because it waits too near? It rests quietly upon the shelves, in Portuguese and in English, in translations and half-translations, in pages folded by former readers and margins where strangers left traces of themselves. It waits through decades and centuries like a bell suspended in the air, expecting hands, expecting breath, expecting wonder. And we pass by. We pass by as festivals pass by, as banners flutter and fade, as tents cast their brief shadows upon the afternoon and music rises only to disappear with the evening.

What shall we do, poets, with this silence dressed as celebration? The flags ascend. The booths blossom. The streets fill with laughter. The day adorns itself with music, sweet bread, familiar songs, and the comforts of belonging. Yet slowly, almost imperceptibly, Camões descends into the bottom drawer, into the unopened volume, into the room where no one enters anymore. We praise the name and forget the voice. We remember the portrait and neglect the page. Yet a civilization is not preserved by remembering a face. It survives by returning to its words.

To sing is to tear roses from the throat. But who still bleeds from the thorns? Who still allows language to wound them into wonder? Who still reads until midnight becomes morning and the centuries collapse into a single heartbeat?

What shall we do, poets, with the children of the diaspora? What sea shall we leave them? A sea of photographs? A sea of costumes? A sea of recipes carefully measured and lovingly preserved? Or shall we leave them that other sea, the difficult sea, the sea of books, where words survive storms, where meaning learns to outlive distance, and where identity is not inherited but discovered?

For to love an inheritance is not to hang it upon a wall. It is not to place it beneath glass. It is not to admire it from a respectful distance. It is to invite it to the table, to question it, to listen to it, to wrestle with it, and finally to let it breathe within us until it becomes part of our own voice.

What shall we do, poets, when the Tenth of June is over, when the last fireworks have fallen into darkness, when the stages are dismantled and the pastries have become crumbs upon the cloth of forgetting? Who will then open the books? Who will return the sea to the poet? Who will hear the murmur of caravels hidden between pages and follow those ancient routes of imagination that still connect island to continent, village to city, Portugal to the diaspora, past to future?

What shall we do, poets, before only the portrait remains and the voice disappears? Before we remember the name and forget the song? Before the language becomes a relic admired rather than a living instrument? Before Camões himself must emigrate a second time—not across oceans, but away from us?

The dead command nothing. The centuries make no demands. The poets ask for no monuments. Yet perhaps we owe something to the light they leave burning. Perhaps we owe them not devotion but attention; not ceremony but reading; not nostalgia but encounter.

For every generation inherits a small flame, and every generation decides whether to guard it, whether to enlarge it, or whether to let the wind carry it away.

What shall we do, poets, with this Tenth of June?

Perhaps only this: open the book. Return to the sea. And listen once more for the voice still rising from the waves.

Diniz Borges