Inner Babel / Babel Interior

  Olhei hoje para o espelho e me vi mais serena, me enxerguei com mais leveza. Não que esteja de fato mais leve, eu acho. Ou será que estou? Tenho ainda infinitas incertezas e dúvidas aos milhares, mas a imagem que me olhou de volta do espelho, não me olha com tristeza, dor pânico.     A imagem que vejo nesse espelho é de     calma, no olhar certa paz, talvez de se entender humana, imperfeita e aceitar essa condição.     Aqui, deste lado que estou, me observando no espelho, sinto ainda o coração encolher como se uma mão o quisesse esmagar. Encolhe-se para sobreviver e expande-se em seguida. Ao encolher-se, a respiração dá uma pausa e uma bolha de cristal sobe em refluxo, pausando ali no meio da goela. Assim que pode, o coração retorna a seu pulsar, seu ir e vir. Permanecem ali as dúvidas, as exigências, as demandas, mas também os desejos de só ser, irresponsavelmente ser e atender a cada quimera. Porque a vida é curta! A vida é sopro!    E o ...

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...

In a world of meritocracy, you receive an inheritance. Not a big fortune, but some money to help pay your debts, help a relative who fell ill. You are grateful, but you did not merit this. You never did anything for it. You think about how many will never be covered by a rain of golden coins fallen from the sky, while some swim in pools of money, modern times uncle Scrooges destilating hatred towards any step directed to the sharing of wealth in the world and holding on to the belief that they earned what they have. It is such the world.  Your daughter helped a friend cheat at a school test and got caught.  She was punished with a big F on her exam. She cries and explains to you she was only trying to help a desperate friend. Deep inside you understand her feelings,  but you agree she has to learn that helping a dishonest deed is the same as doing it. Some other parents heard of the situation. They talk to you and seem shocked by the school's decision to punish ...

No noticiário, a imagem de uma jovem noiva na frente de um helicóptero, um sonho romântico de grandeza e o desejo de surpreender o noivo com uma chegada glamourosa na cerimônia. Um voo curto. Há cinco minutos de distância do salão, em que esperava o noivo, a família e quatrocentos convidados, jazem os restos dos sonhos de um jovem casal. O dono do salão fala ao repórter, lágrimas nos olhos, e conta de seu sofrimento e dificuldade em informar, primeiro, o noivo, que urrou e caiu de joelhos de dor; depois, os convidados, que o encararam em silêncio e descrença. Isso foi ontem e eu não consigo tirar essa história da cabeça. Não consigo faze-la ir embora. Por quanto tempo permanecerá comigo, eu não sei, mas me pergunto se será como uma outra história, que uma amiga uma vez me contou, sobre um colega de trabalho que morreu de repente em uma manhã de quinta-feira. Ela contou que, na segunda seguinte, o departamento em que trabalhavam celebrava, como sempre fazia, os aniversariantes do ...

On the news the image of this young bride in front of a helicopter, some romantic dream of grandeur and the wish to surprise her fiancé with a glamorous arrival at the ceremony. A short flight. Five minutes from arriving to the ballroom where the groom, the family and four hundred guests waited, lay  the remains of the young couple's dreams. The owner of the ballroom talks to the reporter, tears in his eyes, and tells of his pain and difficulty in informing first the groom, who screamed and fell on his knees in pain, then the guests, who stared at him in silence and disbelief.  This was yesterday and I cannot shake the story off my mind, I cannot make it go away. For how long it will remain with me I do not know, but I wonder if it will be like this other story a friend told me about a coworker she had that died suddenly of a heart attack on a Thursday morning. She told me that on the following Monday, the department in which they worked was celebrating, as they usuall...