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Alexander Da Silva Lima Poem
Grandma Marta,
today I smelled burning wood.
It was enough to bring the whole house back.
The wooden walls. The blue window. Smoke in the first sunlight. You before the stove, your hands taming the fire.
I always believed that house had a heart.
It was the stove.
It never went out.
The abundance of the flames contrasted with the scarcity of the food. If there was so little in the pot, why so much fire?
Only years later did I understand:
as long as there was fire, there was hope.
With so little, you did so much.
Poverty was not merely absence.
It was measure.
Sharing before there was not enough.
Saving today for tomorrow's hunger.
A child does not know the size of poverty when someone is trying to hide it.
Poverty took much from us, Grandma, but childhood gave it all back.
Perhaps that is why my memories of that kitchen carry more scent than hunger.
In your hands, what little there was changed its name.
Baião de dois.
Capitão.
If childhood has a flavor, for me it has that name.
Capitão was never merely food.
It was what was in the pot becoming something that fit in a child's hand.
No two were alike.
Each carried the marks of your palm, the grooves of your fingers.
I believed each Capitão carried a piece of your heart.
I was only wrong about what happens to a heart when it is shared.
Yours did not grow smaller.
It grew.
During the week, work stole my parents from me.
On Sunday, your food gave them back.
Perhaps that was one of your greatest miracles:
turning exhaustion back into people.
Beside the stove was the blue window.
I believed God looked through it to watch you cook.
I never imagined God on a throne.
The God of my childhood stayed at Grandma Marta's window, smelling the beans.
It took me many years to learn to read your writing.
You wrote with your hands.
The house disappeared.
The stove went out.
The blue window is no longer there.
You left us in 1993.
But something refused to disappear.
All it takes is the smell of burning wood,
a pot of beans,
a little flour,
and everything finds its way back.
The walls rise again.
The smoke dances in the light.
My parents laugh again.
God looks through the window.
And I become a child again.
When you place the next Capitão in my hand,
I will no longer be afraid that I am eating a piece of your heart.
Today I know that I am.
And perhaps that is precisely why
it is still beating inside me.
Your grandson.
Copyright © Alexander da Silva Lima | Year Posted 2026
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Alexander Da Silva Lima Poem
THE AUTUMN OF THE TEN HOUSES (DHR)
In the settlement of ten houses,
autumn arrived nameless.
The houses were arranged
like an old locomotive
poised to depart.
No child knew
when a season began.
We knew by the cold in the cracks,
by the drier red earth,
by the thin coffee steaming in the mugs,
by the smell of bread
rising near the wood stove.
The relentless summer heat
departed on the cool night breeze.
The poetry of the Paraná River turned to mist
and, in the early morning hours,
sought the warmth of the wood stoves
only to vanish in a kiss.
The old pink silk-floss tree
embodied death as it shed its leaves,
only to give life back later.
From the nearly bare branches,
flowers bloomed where, days before,
there had been only absence.
Its leaves fell slowly,
like the sweat of unjust toil,
like the days torn
from our parents' hands.
We children were in a rush.
In the guava and mango trees,
we picked the fruit while still green
and missed out on the sweetness
for not knowing how to wait.
The silk-floss tree knew a different way.
Its thorn-covered trunk
seemed to say that even beauty
must learn to defend itself.
In autumn, it would undress.
But between March and April,
pink flowers would burst forth
from the nearly empty branches.
Bees, hummingbirds, and birds
would arrive in a festive flurry.
And for a few days,
the poor settlement bloomed along with it.
There was still thin coffee and shared bread,
tired hands feeding the fire before the sun rose.
The scent of roasted coffee
was more invigorating
than the cry of a newborn. The makeshift chimneys
were the old locomotive’s breath.
Poverty had not gone away.
But there were flowers.
The food fit in the dented bottom of a pot.
Hope, in a Sunday meal with the family.
And an entire life,
in a single autumn day.
Copyright © Alexander da Silva Lima | Year Posted 2026
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Alexander Da Silva Lima Poem
I remember little of my childhood.
Or perhaps I remember too much, but all of it in fragments.
Marabá Paulista would wake up before God lit the sun.
First came the smell of packed lunches being prepared—mingling scents
that slipped uninvited through the cracks in the houses' weathered wood.
Then, the diesel fumes and the red dust.
Old trucks, like monsters, rumbled through the streets,
swallowing up the adults and vanishing down the dirt road.
During the day, the town belonged to the children and the elderly.
We thought that was freedom.
At dusk, the trucks returned,
spitting out bodies that were barely alive;
my parents would arrive—worn out, stooped, and weary.
As a boy, I didn't yet know
how to put a name to it.
Today I know:
the trucks didn't just carry workers.
They carried away pieces of childhood.
Copyright © Alexander da Silva Lima | Year Posted 2026
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Alexander Da Silva Lima Poem
Poverty stole the sky from us,
but childhood gave us wings.
God only visited at Christmas,
on the wings of a blue Cessna,
brought by the owner of the farm—and of our souls.
One day a year, God saw me.
Copyright © Alexander da Silva Lima | Year Posted 2026
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