MY HOME Poem by Lêdo Ivo

The Portuguese language is not my home.
No language is a home.
My home is the soft and viscous land where I was born
and the waft of the wind in Maceió.
It is the crabs scurrying through the muck of mangrove swamps
and the ocean whose waves still wet my feet when I dream.
My home is bats hanging from the ceiling of churches in decay,
madmen dancing at sunset in the asylum by the sea,
and the sky curved round by constellations.
My home is the sound of the ship's horn
and the lighthouse high on the hill.
My home is the beggar's hand in radiant morning.
And the rotting shipyards
and the graves by the sea where my ancestors, consumptive
and malarial, can't stop coughing and trembling on cold nights
and the smell of sugar in warehouses along the wharves
and mullets struggling in the fishermen's nets
and strands of onions tangled in the dark
and rain falling over the fish pens.
The language I use is not and never was my home.
No deceitful language is a home.
It merely serves for me to celebrate my great impoverished silent land,
my dysentery-ridden toothless home, devoid of grammar books and dictionaries,
this land, my home, without language, without words.