My Poetry Corner March 2025 features the poem “Expropriation / Expropriação” from the poetry collection Outside of the Bookshelf / Fora da Estante by Brazilian poet and journalist Rubens Jardim (1946-2024). Born in Vila Itambé in the interior of São Paulo, he was one of three siblings, with an older brother and younger sister. Poetry was always a part of his life. An aunt, passionate about poetry with a magnificent collection, would always recite Brazil’s renowned poets at family gatherings. He attributed his skill at public poetry readings to her.

In an interview with Revista Arte Brasileira, following the publication of his Anthology of Unpublished Poems / Antologia de Inéditos in 2018, he spoke a lot about poetry and its importance in his life.

“Poetry for me is alchemy. It is the transformation of the ignoble into the noble, of the invisible into the visible, of the unspeakable into utterance….

I believe that true poetry increases humanity in man. It shows that if there is a flower, there is also hunger…. Furthermore, poetry is a constant struggle against alienation. It’s nonconformity. Indignation…. What’s more, poetry does not bend to anything. Averse to classification and closed thinking to transformation, poetry does not tolerate dictatorship—not even dictatorship of the word…. It’s also a way of living. It’s an attitude towards and within life. And if I continue writing poems—even knowing that poetry is useless—as the poet Manoel de Barros enlighteningly said—it’s because I like to believe that, thanks to poetry, I have kept the flame of hope for transformation alive.

The title of the featured poem “Expropriation” is not a word commonly used in English. More common words used include eviction, foreclosure, disinherited, and disowned. There’s also the word dispossessed mostly used, I think, within religious and social justice circles.

When Jardim published this poem in his collection Outside of the Bookshelf in 2012, the world was still recovering from the 2008 global financial crisis, originating in the US housing market, when millions of people lost their jobs and homes. Foreclosure became a common and dreaded word.

Jardim’s poem, divided into three stanzas of unequal length, is very sparse. Nevertheless, it addresses a society that disowns those among us who are considered outsiders.

1
When I was little
and walked hand in hand with my mother
the whole world was my home.
Today, not even my home
is my home.

Born in 1946, after the end of World War II, the poet grew up in the 1950s during more stable times. His childhood in Vila Itambé was idyllic. Everything changed drastically in the 1960s. He was eighteen years old when, on April 1, 1964, the military staged a coup, plunging Brazil into a military dictatorship for the next twenty-one years. It was the turning point in his life as a poet. The teenage poet joined the Poetic Catechesis movement started by Brazilian poet Lindolf Bell (1938-1998) shortly after the coup.

As Jardim said during his 2018 interview with Revista Arte Brasileira:

“The aim of this movement was to bring the poet closer to the people. That’s why we held public poetry readings in squares, colleges, schools, bars, libraries, nightclubs, theaters, unions, clubs, and bookstores. As a result, Poetic Catechesis became very well-known and even featured in the media. We traveled a lot around the interior of São Paulo and other states in Brazil.”

As was expected, the movement faced pushback from the military regime. In talking about this period of his life in his book Proesia and Other Poetic and Proethical Questions / Proesia e Outras Questões Poéticas & Proéticas, published in May 2019, Jardim relates that they faced bayonets, tear gas, explicit intimidation, and censure, but refused to be silent. Instead, “these poets testified and denounced, with absolute legitimacy, all the stain on one’s reputation and all the horrors of that period” (pp. 34-35).

2
The angels have disappeared
from the mirror.
From the street.
From the villa.
They no longer live
not even in the churches.

The poet describes so well what we now face here in the United States. The teachings of Jesus to love our neighbor as we love ourselves are considered “woke”—detested and criminalized. We are kidnapping our immigrant neighbors and deporting them to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador…without due process. Unhappy the innocent young man trapped in this nightmare.

In the aforementioned book (2019), the then 73-year-old poet writes (p. 24):

“Life is, today, compulsive, superficial, ugly, obscene. You are either inside or outside. Except that, no one knows anymore how to distinguish what is inside and what is outside. The limits and borders were exposed, exceeded, desecrated. We are all—one way or another—empty balloons, virgin film, blank paper—where we are being registered for what one should dream, what one should want, what one should have. Or how one should be….”

3
Before, the world was a gift
refuge
offering.
Today I am outside of everything.
Always outside.
Always in the face of things
in the face of the world
in the face of men.
Alone before God.

As a Caribbean immigrant who has adopted the United States as my home over the past twenty-one years, I, too, am outside of everything. Unless I possess billions of dollars to buy my way into the ruling class, I am worthless. My contribution to society means little. I have no rights of free speech, as provided under the constitution. I am disinherited. I am disowned. I am expropriated.

To read the complete featured poem “Expropriation / Expropriação” in its original Portuguese, and to learn more about the work of Rubens Jardim, go to my Poetry Corner March 2025.