Inner Babel / Babel Interior

Fall in the United States, Fall in the Midwest, my favorite season. When it is Fall there, it is Spring where I am., but Spring where I am is not at all what you would imagine. A dry season. So dry your skin looks gray, your lips crack and your nose bleeds.  It may even make you think of Fall (there) with the carpets of leaves covering sidewalks and parks. You can see them running together when the wind blows the earth beneath them. They run and fly, a few inches from the ground, in a wave of browns and ochers. Spring, here is no time for all flowers. I've said it before and it is true: Flowers here bloom at their will, at their own chosen times. Except for the Ipês. Ipê flowers bloom when all seems lost and dry. They bloom and they are a spectacle! I call them pompom flowers. First, come the pink. There was a tree right in front of the building we used to live. Then, come the yellow, my mother's favorite. Finally, trees are covered by white pompons, which remind me of cherry b...

“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...