Poet Laura: The Verdant Respite of Portugal + New Poet Laura Introduction

Over this past year, I’ve written of places I yearn to be, my querencias. I was blessed in my youth to live in Portugal, specifically Terceira in the Azores, an archipelago of nine islands with the highest point of Portugal being a volcano on Pico. Centuries ago, the archipelago was a respite in the world’s trading triangle, and the islands had been formed by the merging of tectonic plates and volcanoes.

At age eleven, I moved to Portugal, and it was quite the transition for me—a new stepfather, a new country where we traveled back in time. Our plumbing and electricity were intermittent, my sister and I often doing our chores and homework in candlelight, but I came to love this country and its people. Too many wonderful experiences to share here; some were a bit scary. I wrote an essay about one eye-opening day, a day in Praia da Vitoria where small whales beached themselves, an essay titled “A Spectacle in Black and White.” You can read the whole essay here, but following is a short excerpt:

I took a picture that morning with my small Brownie camera. I have few photos of all my memories of those years, and there are so many. Moments lived but not recorded, but they are pictured in my mind — the island a place drenched in a time before the world turned fast and raucous. Days in a land where I discovered the feel of a place so near God’s hand, flush with sea life and volcanoes and caves and winding paths where I learned to walk in the rain and come to accept a man of no familial relation as my father. On an island once spewed from the ocean depths where concepts like Life and Death inched nearer to my understanding. Where a single black and white photograph held in my hand sixty years later etches a swift memory of time, of sorrow, and of man’s fading primal nature to love the wild earth as tenaciously as the tides love the moon.

In those early years, our only family trip to Europe’s mainland was to Madrid, a beautiful city in 1962. Portugal is rich in its history and arts, but I’ve pulled local poetry from the islands. A few years ago, I came across an American poet and translator, Scott Edward Anderson, with roots from Sao Miguel, Portugal. From his poetic book, Azorean Suite, written in English and Portuguese, here is an excerpt:

The sea surrounds, is ever-present
      endless, the sea surrounds
            and sea sounds swirl and sway
humid torpor of temperament
      fog enshrouds
            clouds caught on peaks
wrapping the mountain
      a helmet of white, gray, ash
            the ever-present volcanoes
threat of fire and destruction
      threat of sea-wind and wave
            thread of saudade woven
into the fabric of life
      on the islands ….

—Scott Edward Anderson, excerpted from Azorean Suite

Photo from Unsplash, Luca Severin

In my poem, “Chasm,” I recall exploring a cave in 1961, an enchanting place formed inside a lava tube:

Chasm

There’s a dark hole
in a gray hill on Terceira.
An unsteady step there
plummets to bat-filled black.
Only the brave go on
to Poseidon’s palace—
a room so tranquil
only he could have
molded the basalt walls
dripping gods’ tears
to clear streams.
A glow replenishes
the bright green carpet.
Above, barefoot fishermen
still struggle, each dawn,
with handmade nets to survive
while Neptune lives in splendor
            beneath them.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

The beauty of nature and the sea is abundant in Azorean poetry. From Poems in Absentia & Poems from the Island and the World, Pedro da Silveira, born on the island of Flores, writes of his roots in the Portugal isles. His poems in this collection were translated by George Monteiro. Here is an excerpt from Silveira’s “Absent Poem”:

Absent Poem
to Álamo Oliveira

Sometimes I still dream that I return.
The first island rising in the horizon:
Terns and the sea, rocks, fajás, brooks
Trees cut off in the blue air …
And then, awakening, I sing.

—excerpted from “Absent Poem” by Pedro da Silveira

Fajás refer to landscapes flattened by lava flows. As I dug further in Azorean arts, I found other poets from the small island of Flores, such as Roberto Mesquita, born in 1871, who lived an unfortunate life, had little education, but authored many poems published in local publications. Here, translated to English, is Mesquita’s sonnet.

“Melancholy” (1922)

I entered the cloister: the fountain, as before,
Sand in the marble basin,
But a vast silence shrouded
The sad uninhabited mansion.

From the ground sprouted, flourishing
Wildflowers, mosses, weeds
And the dead monastery carried
My soul to distant times.

“Arise, good monks” with a roar
I then shouted in the sleeping cloister
The centuries have anointed with sorrow.

Alas, my urgent appeal
Is answered only in a painstaking psalm,
By the ailing voice of the wind which there prays.

—Roberto Mesquita

One more poem about all the walks I took in Portugal, rain or shine:

Walking in the Rain

The walks I took in Portugal,
as a girl allowed to roam
paths alone, now haunt me,
for on those walks, an ease
strolled with me as I passed
the gang of street dogs near
the butcher, barking, startled,
yet they knew me, granted passage.

I walked on, turned to the next path.
Most days the rain would drizzle,
fall off and on for I walked
on an isle in the sea, roads of dirt
grounded me, paths skirted in rock
heaped to hold cows or grapevines
green. Mountains loomed past rocked
fields configured like a game board.

Prayerful hush and repose cradled me
’neath sea clouds, constant veils
of mountaintops, volcanoes, shadowed sun.
My solitary respite, cherished walks
on a muddy road, daily, wrapped in a jacket,
endowed as if I walked with God Himself.
A deep sense of place clothed my soul,
whispered who I was, where I belonged,
and I still, 57 years later, ache to return,
though the roads are now paved.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

It’s hard to believe how quickly my year as Tweetspeak’s Poet Laura has passed. This is my last post before the new Poet Laura’s words start ringing true in this column. Last year, when I was recovering from a knee replacement before a second hip replacement (yes, now I’m one knee short of robotic!), L.L. Barkat invited me to be Poet Laura. But she had to track me down as I traipsed around on my walker. I am so grateful that she found me and thankful for this past year discovering new poets and sharing a bit of whimsical verse as well as my history and adventures. I’ll miss it.

Donna Hilbert is the Poet Laura for 2025-2026, and I look forward to reading her columns. In learning who she is, I discovered that one of her books, Threnody, had been sitting in my Amazon cart for too long, and it’s now sitting in a stack beside my chair. I’ve discovered we share a love for the work of Kari Gunter-Seymour, and I’m drawn to the words in her poem “dent de lion.” Glynn Young wrote a Tweetspeak column about Hilbert’s collection of lamentations, and I have two things to say about what he wrote: (1) Why did you include her poem “Buried” that made me weep? Kittens on the Dichondra! Ah, devastating! (2) I loved Young’s description of Hilbert’s work: “Threnody is a circular work, showing that love leads to grief leads to love.” I look forward to the coming year and how Hilbert will surely take us on a whole new journey of wordplay, adventures, and digging into our curious and creative bones.

To close out my last Poet Laura column, here is my poem that’s a favorite with all the poets where I read at open mikes.

Driving Home from Kerrville

“Mom.”
Awed by the sight of a tree full of blackbirds,
I turned toward my daughter.
“Mom, you don’t have to write a poem about everything!”

Well, well, well.
Yes, I do.
On some days
everything speaks.
Observations—
especially the small things,
keen interactions,
a flight in winged breeze—
each one opens portals
where I travel
into new rooms
full of lilted light
and wily words
where visions beget
            visions.

Everything is poetry.

—Sandra Fox Murphy

Featured photo by Nathalie, Creative Commons license via Flickr. Poems by Sandra Fox Murphy used with permission. Post and post photos by Sandra Fox Murphy. “Melancholy” is in the Public Domain.

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Sandra Fox Murphy

Sandra grew up everywhere as a USAF dependent, rootless, and when exposed to the beatnik poets at Indian Valley College, was smitten with poetry. After retirement from the U.S. Geological Survey, she found herself immersed in storytelling, and ensconced in Texas, researches small-town history and is the author of six novels, including Let the Little Birds Sing, the beginning of the Fidelia McCord Trilogy inspired by a young girl who came to Texas in 1847. Aging Without Grace is her first poetry collection, and her poems have been published at the Ocotillo Review, The Write Launch, Humans of the World, The River, and in several anthologies. Sandra's muses are the environment, history, and the natural beauty and mystery of place.

Latest posts by Sandra Fox Murphy (see all)

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