Cerejas
by Helena Marques — poems, in Portuguese
For grown-up readers. Written and published in Portuguese; there is no English edition yet.
"A vida é um cesto de cerejas: umas doces, outras amargas, todas vermelhas de intensidade." A life is a basket of cherries: some sweet, some bitter, all of them red with intensity. That line, from the book's own opening page, is the seed everything else grows from.
Cerejas gathers twenty-six poems written in the season after love, after loss, after the long, ordinary labor of coming back to yourself. They speak to a partner and to a friend, to the people who stayed and the ones who didn't, to grief and to the strange mercy of impermanence. There is one, near the end, that says plainly what the whole book has been circling: "tudo o que foi verdadeiro, mesmo quando acaba, permanece" — everything that was real, even when it ends, remains.
This is not the book for a child's shelf. It is for the reader beside them — the parent, the aunt, the friend who has loved fully and been changed by it. Same hand that wrote The Golden Thread, a different kind of thread entirely.