Inner Babel / Babel Interior

2 idiotas, um na presidência,  um logo abaixo, fora os outros  dois estrupícios, um aqui,  outro lá  0  contribuições para a UNE Zero grana para facilitar um movimento Zero vírgula sete por cento de desenvolvimento  Zero de vergonha na cara da mídia comemorando “a retomada” 1 povo desanimado e adoecido Um povo louco na rua pedindo volta da ditadura  Um dia para celebrar uma injustiça semi remediada  Um dia para se alegrar 9 vezes pensei em desistir, em partir Nove vezes me lembrei de resistir, de persistir Nove escritores no máximo é o que cabe aqui  Mas nove vezes nove vezes nove vezes nove vezes  Nos levarão a algum lugar  Quando ou depois de 2020 chegar 

As I seat here to write with a group of women from around the Globe, I feel I have to look inside myself. And myself, this week, is exhausted and cluttered. I am not sure I can look inside and find anything. Like a teenager's room, full of clothes and books scattered on the floor. I will probably find rests of food inside a drawer or a used ballet shoe among the t-shirts. Like a teenager, perhaps, I'm not sure I want to organize that room. I'm uncertain of where or how to start .  I've been losing things. These past two months of the year, this year that only had two months so far. I've lost a bracelet, a diamond ring, a necklace, not to mention a number of earrings I cannot locate. I've lost so much more in the turning of the year to 2019. Maybe I should not even care about these little things I've lost now. I, we, the country, lost hope, faith, the outlook for a better future. But maybe that is exactly why it upsets me losing any stupid small thing....

“The real poet is always a resistance force. The false poet, however, regardless of the causes he argues to advocate, is always conniving”, the Portuguese writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen stated this in an interview in 1963. One year previous to the military coup d’état suffered by Brazil  which brought us twenty years of dictatorship and an authoritarian and antidemocratic inheritance that keeps so many of us still hostage  as if we were still living a Stockholm syndrome of sorts. Today, 2018, her words comfort me in my poet’s fate, in my truth and in the fact that I stand surrounded by other very real and resistant poets. We resist together, seeking light in these dark times, in the search of a country where love would be the empire and diversity would triumph. It is in diversity that beauty resides, it is in beauty that poetry inhabits. The beauty found in our day to day struggles, the beauty found in the truth and battles we face, the beauty found in the swea...