Portuguese poetry – Portuguese Writer

May 10, 2026May 10, 2026

Praise

PRAISE

I find my peace descending through the notebook
towards a blank page

besieged by noise and by emptiness, my words
hold themselves in reserve for You, for the radiance of morning,
for the voice that leads me along the tortuous thread
of time

in my fingers I feel the rigor of water, the labor
of soap, Your joy

like grasses greening in the earth, the words flow:
I know men will come with their many blades,
they will come with the fire of their loveless hearts
and that small infinite light may not endure
beyond half a season

but it does not matter.
there was in my wrists the tremor, the miracle
repeated from the days of the beginning
and I know that every poem is born for You, all the green
of humble, useless things
and I know that I am fortunate, because You taught me so

Poem by João Ricardo Lopes | Translated by Marcus Margrave (2026)

May 6, 2026May 7, 2026

My Father

MY FATHER

my father sets stakes in the backyard.
at his age he still lifts the tangled rows of peas,
the strawberries, and the white blossoms of the plum tree,
and later the beautiful, heavy bodies of its fruit.
he crouches, in silence, mending wire threads,
braiding and unbraiding the pumpkin ropes.
sometimes, toward nightfall, he keeps tying
and untying knots,
always crouched, always with his back turned.
if we offer him a word, water, a handful of walnuts,
he raises a hand in quiet protest.
why does my father work so much.
to whom does he wish to pass, with such pain,
his stakes lifted to the sky.
what does his weary tongue say, full of hints,
already hungry – I want to believe – for eternity

.

Poem by João Ricardo Lopes | Translated by Marcus Margrave (2026)

February 10, 2026March 27, 2026

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/

February 4, 2026March 27, 2026

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

January 10, 2026March 27, 2026

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

October 23, 2025March 27, 2026

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

September 11, 2025March 27, 2026

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

Tag: Portuguese poetry

Praise

My Father

Rembrandt’s sadness

February

Vermeer

Hands

Our own image

To translate

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