Portuguese poetry – Portuguese Writer

2026-02-102026-02-10

Rembrandt’s sadness

REMBRANDT’S SADNESS

the question was always this:
can someone’s sadness, at any time, in any place,
ever find a way to be satisfied?

we have our doubts about the matter

sadness shares with water the sin of avarice.
first it skips about, then it digs itself in,
and a little further on it hollows out sombre lights
through the hills,
one day it cuts across our path

“you shall not pass,” it writes under its breath,
“you shall not pass”

let us consider the case of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn

his pain seems limitless, growing from portrait
to portrait, like a river that knows itself unstoppable
in its predatory course

looking into his eyes as they look into the mirror,
we see Saskia and the promissory notes, old age imprinted
in the swellings and the cracks of the skin

what is the size or the depth of his grief?

we have an idea about the matter,
water is a good term of comparison

one day it makes us sink into a delirium of silver‑gelatin paper.
but not even there, not even then, does it show itself fully sated.
sadness will not abide the earth’s crust,
its kingdom lies in the deepest hells,
or even beyond them.

Poem by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

João Ricardo Lopes is a contemporary Portuguese poet and writer.

More about:
https://joaoricardolopes.com/about/

2026-02-042026-02-10

February

FEBRUARY

you will often return to yourself
as one enters places where hearths once burned
and where the smell of smoke lingers
melancholic
and invisible

an autumnal or wintry mustiness
grips your startled hands
and wants to sink them into the earth

so take the necessary precautions

when the tangle of days on your shoulder blade
feels like cement or hatred in its pure state,
leave the house, breathe the grasses, bite their stems
hard

don’t ask why, bite them,
and that’s that

Poem by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

2026-01-102026-02-10

Vermeer

VERMEER

in these days of vertigo, when the world seems to go mad with every gunshot, and even open books are grasping mouths waiting for impure truths to be spoken through them, I return to Vermeer’s silent paintings: to the milkmaid pouring the white unhurriedly, imbued with grace; to the geographer who, through the panes of glass, discerns the inexact place of thought; to the girl reading the mysterious letter, in which she may be shown a certain love, not delicate like a poem, but in the hardness of verbs that do not hide in grammar and instead strip themselves bare in living gestures, difficult and unfeigned

Poem by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

2025-10-232026-02-10

Hands

One of Herberto Helder’s most celebrated poems begins: “Amo devagar os amigos que são tristes com cinco dedos de cada lado” / “I love slowly the friends who are sad, with five fingers on each side” (“Aos Amigos,” Poemacto, 1961). Nothing gives itself to us—or gives us so deeply to others—as our hands do. The touch of hands trains our feelings, soothes the wretched, supports the powerless, opens places of refuge and hope to strangers and wanderers, draws in both the different and the familiar, seals pacts, builds bridges, and writes the essential words that the future will allow to take root.

On their skin, in the varied form of the fingers (as though the blessed difference of size and function made them inseparable creators of life), in the beauty of the nails, in the small blue threads of blood running to the tiniest venules and arterioles, in the lines where their phalanges bend and the full shell of their bones closes—there lies a science of fire.

By this science of fire I mean the gift we all possess (and so often refuse): the gift of loving, even in shadow, even in silence, on the humble scale of those who bring forth not injury but a poem, not hatred but friendship, not a hostile fist but an open and willing hand.

Herberto ends his poem with prophetic lines: “– Temos um talento doloroso e obscuro. / Construímos um lugar de silêncio. / De paixão.” / “– We have a painful and obscure talent. / We build a place of silence. / Of passion.” The world of men will only be saved when they understand what their hands are for—when they love the sad ones who keep them open, with five fingers on each side.

Text by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

2025-09-112026-02-10

Our own image

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen photographed by Eduardo Gageiro

In one of the poems of No Tempo Dividido, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen writes, in the manner of an inscription: “Que no largo mar azul se perca o vento / E nossa seja a nossa própria imagem” — “That in the wide blue sea the wind be lost / And ours be our own image.”

The pelagic world was for the poet, as is commonly known, a demiurgic, almost religious space, from which emerged her creative force, her fascination with ancient time (which was equally her fascination with the inscrutable future), but also her most personal delight in the peoples who, having sailed those seas of a remote past (the Greeks, in particular), bequeathed to us their art, their beauty, their nude, and within them (as in Heidegger’s ontology) our destiny.

Sophia’s poems are, without exception, exercises in incomparable lapidary art. We read them today under the relative oblivion to which every work is consigned after the death of its author. Yet for this very reason we rediscover them as more vehement, more marvellously sculpted, more true. We read them as an extension of ourselves, as though seated on a garden bench among the twisted trunks of giant trees (like these metrosideros in Foz do Douro), the wide blue sea before us seemed more real, and our own spirit wandered amid those waves and the scent of the sea breeze, while between the seated body and the wandering spirit there existed something unnameable. Something like our own image, doubly beheld in the mirror.

Text by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

2025-05-222025-05-23

The Actor Looks at Himself in the Mirror

THE ACTOR LOOKS AT HIMSELF IN THE MIRROR

do not wait so long for me
I have no future
as past I did not have.
handsome I may be
however crude
no less than statue
nor better than sand.
like every creature
what I am I am no longer.
my hands burn with the cold
and I may already be dead
or too far.
do not wait so long for me
you do not know who you wait for

Translated by Bernarda Esteves

O ACTOR OLHA-SE AO ESPELHO

não esperes tanto por mim
não tenho futuro
como passado não tive.
belo talvez seja
porém cru
não menos que estátua
nem melhor do que areia.
como toda a criatura
o que sou não sou.

as mãos ardem-me de frio
e talvez esteja já tão morto
ou longe de mais.
não esperes tanto por mim
não sabes quem esperas.