We grow up believing that power belongs to the one who speaks last.

To the one who decides.

To the one who says yes or no.

To the one who stays or walks away.

We are taught that power sits in the hands of the chooser, never the chosen. In the voice that rejects, never in the silence that endures. In the door that closes, never in the one left standing outside of it.

But that is a fragile illusion.

Because the person who gives the last word is not necessarily the one who holds power. Often, they are only holding control. And control is loud, immediate, and visible. Power is quieter. Deeper. Harder to recognize.

Real power doesn't tremble when it's rejected. It doesn't collapse when it's misunderstood. It doesn't beg for validation from someone who can't see its worth.

Real power begins the moment you understand what you deserve.

Not what you can convince someone to give you.

Not what you can tolerate.

Not what you can survive.

What you deserve.

There is a radical strength in looking at rejection and saying "this doesn't define my value". There is a defiance in walking away not because you were dismissed, but because you refuse to accept less that what honors you.

The world will try to measure power by outcomes. Who won, who lost, who stayed, who left. But the deepest form of power has nothing to do with being right or wrong, accepted or denied. It has everithing to do with self-recognition.

When you know you deserve more, something shifts. You stop negotiating your dinity. You stop shrinking to fit into places that can't hold your magnitude. You stop apologizing for wanting depth, loyalty, respect, truth.

And that is terrifying to people who confuse power with dominance.

Because a person who knows their worth can't be manipulated by approval or fear. They can't be controlled by scarcity or guilt. They don't chase what diminishes them.

They choose themselves.

And choosing yourself, without anger, without vengeance, without the need to prove anything, that is a silent revolution.

It takes courage to say "even if I'm rejected, I remain valuable".

It takes courage to say "even if you think I'm too much, I'll not become less".

It takes courage to pursue more. More respect, more love, more alignment. Without apology.

The true power isn't in having the final word.

It's in knowing that your worth was never up for debate.

 Healing is not silence.

It's not exile.

It's not pretending the wound never existed.

For a long time, I believed that to heal I had to run, to burry the memories so deep that even I couldn't reach them. I thought distance was strength. I thought never speaking about it again meant I had won. I confused avoidance with recovery.

But silence is not peace. It's just fear wearing a calm face.

Real healing is something far mor brutal and far more honest.

It's being able to turn toward what happened instead of away from it. It's saying the words out loud without your voice trembling. It's telling the story without editing out the parts that made you feel small, terrified, abandoned, shattered. It's looking at the wreckage and no longer needing to lie about how much it hurt.

Healing is not erasing the past.

It's surviving your own memories.

There was a time when thinking about it felt like drowning. My chest would tighten, my breath would shorten, my body would react as if the danger were happening all over again. The pain was not a memory, it tas a living thing. It clawed at me. It swallowed me whole.

Now, when I look back, I still see it clearly. I still know exactly what it cost me. But it no longer owns my pulse. It no longer dictates my oxygen. I can speak about it without feeling that desperate, mortal panic rising in my throat.

That is healing.

Not forgetting.

Not forgiving prematurely.

Not minimizing what happened.

But remembering and remaining steady.

It's the quiet power of saying "yes, that broke me for a while", and feeling no shame in the admission. It's telling the truth without collapsing under its weight. It's touching the scar and realizing it's no longer an open wound.

The past doesn't disappear. It becomes integrated. It becomes part of your architecture instead of the storm that destroys it.

Healing is not about never mentioning it again.

It's about mentioning it and no longer bleeding when you do.

It's about standing in front of what once felt fatal and realizing: it no longer has the power to kill me.

And that steady breath, that grounded heartbeat is freedom.

- Midnight thoughts...

To write a good poem,

you must first survive a good story.

Not the kind that ends in applause,

but the kind that leaves splinters

under your skin.

You must walk through a night

that does not promise morning.

You must love something

that does not promise to stay.

You must hold a name in your mouth

like a prayer

and then learn how to swallow it

when no one answers.

A good story will break you properly.

It will teach you the architecture of ruin

how walls fall inward,

how silence can be louder than screaming,

how a heart can keep beating

even after it has been asked to stop.

Before the poem, there is the trembling.

Before the metaphor, 

there is the bruise.

Before the rhythm,

there is the irregular breathing

of someone trying not to fall apart

in a room that smells like goodbye.

You must survive the moment

when you realize

you are not the hero.

You are the witness.

You are the wound.

You are the quiet aftermath

where dust settles on broken glass.

And then, only then

when the fire has done its work

and left you ash but breathing,

when memory no longer roars

but hums like a distant train,

when pain becomes a language

instead of a scream

you sit down.

Your hands will still shake.

Good. Let them.

Because a good poem 

is not written with ink.

It is written with what remains

after the story tried to erase you

and failed.

To write a good poem,

you must first survive a good story

and carry its scars

like punctuation

across the white page.

    

 

Whatever You Will Go - The Calling

            Patti Smith once wondered what Sylvia Plath might have tought in those final moments, whether her mind, so fiercely alive on the page, drifted toward her children, toward Ted, toward the bright wreckage of her own becoming. It is impossible not to follow that question into the quiet room where morning had not yet fully broken.

            What does a poet think at the edge of her own unwritten line?

            Perhaps she did not think in sentences at all. Perhaps language, her faithful instrument, her blade and her balm, fell away, and what remained was something rawer. A sensation. A memory. A flicker of bees humming in the mind, those tireless architects of sweetness and sting. The bees of Ariel, swarming and sovereign. The bees she tended in Devon, as if tending some fractured republic within herself.

       Or perhaps she thought of her children sleeping in the next room. Frieda's breath, Nicholas's small hands curled like unopened petals. A mother's mind does not relinquish its orbit easily. Even in despair, love remains, a tether, a weight, a costellation. Did she picture their futures the way poets picture landscapes, luminous, distant, possible? Or did she feel, with unbearable clarity, the terrible paradox of loving fiercely while believing oneself unfit to remain?

            Sylvia Plath's life was always split between brilliance and fracture. She was both the girl who won prizes and the woman who pressed her pulse against the hard glass of expectation. She was the scholar of  Smith College, the wife in a cold London flat, the writer rising befor dawn to carve her voice into the dark. She knew the architecture of ambition. She also knew its collapse.

            There is a line in Lady Lazarus: "Dying / Is an art, like everything else." Readers have wrestled with it for decades, accusing, defending, mythologizing. But perhaps the line was never about spectacle. Perhaps it was about control. About shaping the narrative when everything else feels shapeless. The poem performs resurrection, yes, but performance is not peace. Art can transform suffering into beauty; it cannot aways dissolve the suffering itself.

            Did she think of Ted Hughes? Or the early days when language braided them together, when metaphors passed between their mouths like shared breath? Love, especially love between artists, is rarely gentle. It burns, consumes, demands witness. In the aftermath of betrayal, what lingers is not only anger but the ghost of who one was while loving. Did she mourn him, or the self she had been beside him?

            Or perhaps she did not think of the past at all. Perhaps she was suspended in a stark and wordless present. A winter morning. The kind of cold that stiffens resolve. The kind of silence that feels absolute. There is a moment in Virginia Woolf's diaries, another woman who walked toward the end, throgh the water, where clarity feels almost crystalline. Not joy, not relief, but a narrowing. A corridor of certainty.

            And yet, it is dangerous to romanticize corridors.

            We return to Sylvia Plath because her poems remain incandescent. Because Ariel did not fade with her. Because the voice that seemed to extinguish itself became, paradoxically, immortal. There is tragedy in that irony, that the world finally listened with full attention only after she was gone.

            But I wonder if, in those final minutes, she thought not of fame, nor of critics, nor even of the long arc of literature. Perhaps she thought of something small. The smell of bread. The scape of a pen across paper. The memory of the sea at Winthrop, glittering and indifferent. Perhaps she remembered her father, looming and lost, the figure who hounted so much of her work. Perhaps she whispered a line only she could hear.

            Or perhaps there were no grand thoughts at all, only exhaustion. The kind that sinks into the bones and refuses negotiation.

            We project onto her because we cannot bear the void of not knowing. Patti Smith asks the question not to solve it, but to sit beside it. To honor the human beneath the myth. To remember that before Sylvia Plath became a symbol, she was a woman in a room, carrying too much.

       The final thoughts of a poet may not be poetic. They may be fragmented, ordinary, painfully human. And maybe that is what unsettles us most, that even the most luminous minds are not spared from darkness.

            What  remains is the work. The fierce music of her lines. The way she wrote herself into fire and frost and refused to be small. Whatever passed through her mind in those last moments, the poems endure, alive, electric, uncontained.

            And perhaps that is the only answer we are allowed.

            

- Midnight thoughts...

 In English, we say I like to talk with you,

a simple truth, neatly folded, 

polite as a smile shared across a room.

But in love we murmur:

I wanna hear every little thing you say,

the half-formed thoughts,

the soft rambles,

the stories you think don't matter

because to me, they're constellations.

In English, we say I like to talk with you,

as if words were something we trade.

But in love we confess:

your voice is the place my heart leans toward,

every syllable a thread tugging me closer,

every pause a promise you don't know you're making.

In English, we say I like to talk with you,

a phrase that fits in daylight.

But in love we know:

I memorize the shape of your sentences,

I replay the way you breathe between words,

I hold your laughter lika a lantern in my chest.

In English, we say I like to talk with you.

But in love,

we say I wanna hear every little thing you say,

and we mean:

your voice feels like home,

even when you're not here.

- Midnight thoughts...

Sometimes I stand on the edge of myself -

half fire, half frost,

burning for something I can't name

and freezing from the fear of wanting it.

Some days, I am a storm of conviction:

loud, sure, unshakable.

Other days, I fold into silence,

a whisper afraid of its own echo.

I crave softness -

yet, I armor my heart with steel.

I long to stay - 

yet, every bone in me aches to run.

I reach toward the light,

and still, shadows cling to me.

I love the quiet,

yet, I ache for chaos and thunder.

And still - 

even with the conflict humming beneath my ribs

I exist in the in-between,

breathing, searching, becoming.

Because somewhere inside me,

beneath the noise and the doubt, 

there is a truth whispering:

You are allowed to be both.

You are allowed to be the fire and the ice.

You are allowed to be the storm

and the calm after it.

- Midnight thoughts...

 Aquele lugar, o ar.

Primeiro, fiquei sabendo que gostava de Diadorim - de amor mesmo, amor mal encoberto em amizade. Me a mim, foi de repente, que aquilo se esclareceu: falei comigo. Não tive assombro, não achei ruim, não me reprovei - na hora. Melhor alembro.

O nome de Diadorim, que eu tinha falado, permaneceu em mim. Me abracei com ele. Mel se sente é todo lambente - "Diadorim, meu amor..." Como era que eu podia dizer aquilo?

E como é que o amor desponta?

Coração cresce de todo lado. Coração vige feito riacho colominhando por entre serras e varjas, matas e campinas. Coração mistura amores. Tudo cabe.

E eu - como é que posso explicar ao senhor o poder de amor que eu criei? Minha vida o diga. Se amor? ... Diadorim tomou conta de mim.

E de repente eu estava gostando dele, num descomum, gostando ainda mais do que antes, com meu coração nos pés, por pisável; e dele o tempo todo eu tinha gostado. Amor que amei - daí então acreditei.

Um Diadorim só para mim. Tudo tem seus mistérios. Eu não sabia. Mas, com minha mente, eu abraçava com meu corpo aquele Diadorim - que não era de verdade. Não era?

Diadorim deixou de ser nome, virou sentimento meu.

Aquilo me transformava, me fazia crescer dum modo, que doía e prazia. Aquela hora, eu pudesse morrer, não me importava.

Diz-que-direi ao senhor o que nem tanto é sabido: sempre que se começa a ter amor a alguém, no rameirão, o amor pega e cresce é porque, de certo jeito, a gente quer que isso seja, e vai, na ideia, querendo e ajudando; mas quando é destino dado, maior que o miúdo, a gente ama inteiriço fatal, carecendo de querer, e é um só facear com as surpresas. Amor desse, cresce primeiro; brota é depois.

Tudo turbulindo. Esperei o que vinha dele. De um aceso, de mim eu sabia: o que compunha minha opinião era que eu, às loucas, gostasse de Diadorim, [...] no fim de tanta exaltação, meu amor inchou, de empapar todas as folhagens, e eu ambicionando de pegar em Diadorim, carregar Diadorim nos meus braços, beijar, as muitas demais vezes, sempre.

Abracei Diadorim, como as asas de todos os pássaros.

Só se pode viver perto de outro, e conhecer outra pessoa, sem perigo de ódio, se a gente tem amor. Qualquer amor já é um pouquinho de saúde, um descanso na loucura...

amor é a gente querendo achar o que é da gente.

Grande Sertão: Veredas - João Guimarães Rosa

Trechos lidos por Maria Bethânia em "Caderno de Poesias".