My Poetry Corner September 2023 features the poem “Ears of Dew” (Ouvidos de Orvalho) by Brazilian poet, writer, journalist, and columnist Fabrício Carpinejar from his award-winning 2002 poetry collection Biography of A Tree (Biografia de Uma Árvore).Born in 1972 in Caixas do Sul in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, he is the third of four children of the poets Maria Carpi and Carlos Nejar. At nine years old, after his parents separated, he was raised by his mother.

Growing up in a home with a large library, the young Fabrício was free to explore any book that aroused his interest. “At 7 years old I was already a poet. I have always been excessively distracted,” Carpinejar told journalist Marcio Renato dos Santos during an interview for the Public Library of Paraná in August 2017. “Imagine, I am the son of two poets, so at home the language was metaphor. We spoke in metaphors, in figures of speech. I see people speaking objectively, but that’s not my idiom. I was raised in another environment. And I’ve always been a basement child, a tree child. There are children who have pets, I had a tree. A plum tree, lived in it, it was mine and no other brother could climb it. It was where I hid to cry, when I was angry, etc. This is a poetic distraction. So I’ve always been weird. And weirdness is a poetic gift.”

The blossoming poet moved to Porto Alegre, the state capital, where he studied journalism at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, graduating in 1995. Upon launching his first book of poetry in 1998, he began signing his name as Carpinejar, the combination of his parents’ surnames. In 2002, following the success of his first four poetry collections, he became a master in Brazilian Literature at his alma mater.

Set in the year 2045, Carpinejar’s fourth poetry collection Biography of A Tree begins on his 73rd birthday when he settles his accounts with God. “It’s an intimate apocalypse,” he told Rogério Eduardo Alves during an interview for the Folha de S. Paulo in September 2002.  “The poetry [in the collection] is the ear of the tree, the ear of the dew, the hearing of hesitations and small defeats. God does not speak; man fills his silence and squanders his name to relieve himself of his own judgment. I combat the easy idea of transcendence in Brazilian poetry. God appears in the book in the second person and always in lower case, in direct treatment, shoulder to shoulder. In the end, God is fired for just cause. To be fired is the contemporary and possible death of God, an evolution of death described by Nietzsche. To fire God is like taking away his market functionality, the productivity of his days, his guardianship over our destiny.”

The featured poem “Ears of Dew” is a free-style poem of 78 lines divided into 17 stanzas, each ranging from one to fourteen verses. The poetic persona speaks only in metaphors, making translation difficult. The two opening stanzas so captured my imagination that I accepted the challenge of transcending my physical human body and being poured into God, together with my waste (line 29).

In eternity, no one imagines oneself eternal.
Here, in this state, I think I will last
beyond my years, that I will have
another chance to get back what I didn't do.
If to forgive is to forget, the worst awaits me:
I will be forgotten when redeemed.

Don't forgive me, God. Don’t forget me.
Oblivion never returns its hostages.

The poetic persona sees his life with clarity[that] doesn’t repeat itself. He reckons with the voice com[ing] from the fire that cast [him] too soon into the ashes. During his lifetime, he risked shortcuts and unknow paths, believing that he could leave through the entrance. He admits in the sixth stanza that he was driven by fear of punishment.

My conversion is through fear,
praying on my knees before the revolver,
without turning aside,
not sure if it's a toy or real.

The wind bends in the following stanza, leaving me lost in the metaphorical meandering of the tree child’s conscience. Instead of making excuses for his actions, he chooses to withdraw in silence. In the tenth stanza, he acknowledges humanity’s failure to achieve our full potential as God’s creation, craving only the pleasures of life.

We sing in chorus like animals of the dark.
The eyelashes did not germinate.
There is a lack of planting in our mouths, vegetation in the nails,
impressions and herbs in the chest.
We plead for bass and treble, ecstasy and wonder,
composing corner with the night.

The human condition, in all its frailties, is explored in the following three stanzas: We are smoke and wax, / slime and tile, / fog and rudder. / Winter invented us. Whether we heed God’s word, we cannot escape death. In the fourteenth stanza, the poetic persona imagines his desolate fate beyond the grave.

I will be isolated and reduced,
a photograph emptied of dates.
Family members will try to decipher who I was
and what flourished from the legacy.
I would be a stranger in the portrait
with bright eyes on old paper.

He further explores the aftermath of our departure in stanzas 15 and 16 where, after death, everything can be read. There are no more secrets. Friends are recorded through newspaper obituaries. Nature’s beauty also fades like the rose [that] crumbles to the touch / in the paleness of petals and candles. In the final seventeenth stanza, he stands before his lifeless body, reluctant to let go.

There is nothing natural about natural death.
To divorce yourself from the body, to tremble on holding
the legs, to accommodate yourself in the finite
of a bed and to lie down with the tumult
that comes from an empty tomb.

The tumult… from an empty tomb suggests the tragedy of loved ones lost forever without closure: the missing, the taken, the disappeared.

To read the complete featured poem “Ears of Dew / Ouvidos de Orvalho” in English and its original Portuguese, and to learn more about Fabrício Carpinejar and his work, go to my Poetry Corner September 2023.