the port trilogy : Na sua luz
Between a sky in perpetual transformation and the power of an omnipresent river, Na sua luz (In Your Light) is a wandering through a labyrinth of streets and alleys, staircases and shadowed passageways, where one struggles to discern whether the cartography revealed belongs to the city offering itself or to a faltering intimacy. This narrative chooses to proscribe those words laden with an exoticism too eagerly anticipated.
How, at the end of this dialogue with the city—an Olympian mineral mass, at times overwhelmed by astral fire, at others held hostage by Dantean deluges—can one articulate what has been taught by withdrawal, by lack, by absence? What improbable felicity will ensure that the day after no longer resembles the day before, and how might we reconnect with bonds we once so fervently desired to break free from?
Bruno Green, Lisbonne - novembre 2016.
Na sua luz is a poetic crossing of Lisbon, where the city becomes a mirror of an inner world, a stage for meditation on time as it unravels. In a dense and musical language, the author blends sensory observation with existential reflection, exploring the fragility of time, the erosion of memory, and an obstinate desire for meaning. Far from the picturesque clichés of tourism vendors, the city emerges as an ambivalent figure: both tender and elusive, a wounded lover, a forgotten sentinel, a sanctuary of melancholy, bathed in light yet gnawed by oblivion. Straddling poetic prose and intimate chronicle, this text stands in the lineage of Pessoa, Calvino, and Magris, affirming a singular voice that is deeply incarnate.
Lecture Critique, Michel Baillargeon - 2025
Na sua luz is published by Éditions QazaQ as part of the Maison Poésie Brest collection as a digital edition,
and by Silent Graphics Éditions as an art book available on our Boutique page.
Al-Ushbuna, immense nature with an excess of sky, massive and placid. At my feet, your old city rests, a beat behind in time, a tranquility ahead. Your monochrome basalt cobblestones gently trace the waves of my melancholy, while the jacarandas explode in shades of blue, pink, and mauve; in a few days, polyglot and carefree footsteps will tread upon a lavender carpet.
Rainha dos mares, your fragrances are not those of your rivals; you have spoken every language, embraced every belief. Western lookout, mineral and fluid, coveted, offended, scorned, yet always miraculously preserved—city of eternal departure, languishing at your mooring, you have sought so hard to detach yourself from the continent that is yours.
Iridescent blindness, the luminescent downpour crashes into puddles, burning all that can be forgotten from one day to the next. Between the motionless white stone quays and the canopy of pure, vibrating sky over burdened bodies and minds struck by anopsia, my wounds seek their drying in your clarity.
Your national melancholy is a language of tenderness and love, a need for tears that cannot find its way, a peaceful sorrow without violence or outbursts. It is the cement of existences that nothing justifies, yet which retain the hope of discovering a meaning, feigning ignorance that the fabric unrolling beyond the loom of time is called oblivion.
Swallows trace broad volutes across the azure to the joyful sound of the bells of São Cristóvão, tolling like an ancient memory. Beneath bodices, breasts defy gravity—untouchable, juvenile—a desire opening onto the void and the belief in the contagious power of full youth, as if the terrifying mastery of our vertigo were suddenly restored to us, just when we thought we had worn out our paths and surrendered our directions to those who walk in our footsteps.
