☀ Today's Poem: "Elegy with Azeite Pão de Ló" Carla Sofia Ferreira

—para Tia Madalena, Tio Marcelino, Rita e Tiago.

As a child I lived two stories above a funeral home
and I spent my summers on the other side of the Atlantic
Ocean, and I need you to know that none of this is a metaphor.

I need you to know that when I tell you my Tia Madalena
had a voice that sounded like a hundred church bells and
that she washed my hair one July morning with fresh olive oil,

that the olive oil was real and so were her hands in my hair. I need you
to know that this was another language for love— pouring azeite over
a child's head and helping the strands gleam into the summer sunlight.

Words are only air folded into sound and I do not know how real
they are anyway. I am not writing to you in the language my parents
spoke as children. Our goodbyes are even half English, half Portuguese,

a whole other language. What I am trying to say is what I cannot imagine.
I cannot imagine my aunt, her voice a hundred church bells, with lungs
drowning in water that would not save her, a treatment that we knew would

hurt but did not think would kill. I am unable to imagine her breath like that.
I can only hear her voice calling my name Carlinha and I think, every year
I am losing someone who calls me by that name, whose tenderness was warm

olive oil in my hair and not merely empty words in air. I am an ocean away
when she dies and my parents go to the house that is empty without her ringing
voice. Tio Marcelino serves pão de ló, a cake of five ingredients mostly air—

the hands that make it need to firmly whip the egg whites and then gently fold
them so the dough contains enough breath to rise. It is careful work. My father asks,
The cake is good, where is it from? and then regrets asking. Tia made it the night

before she died and I wish this were all some kind of metaphor because then it could
be a bad poem and not a terrible truth. For a child who grew up only a few stories
above so many funerals, I am an adult who is so childish about death: I keep making

this story, that I will go back one day to the home of those summer weekends in Labruge,
that I will ring the bell only to hear her voice filling the air. Instead, we keep these echoes
of her hands, working firm and gentle into a kindness that still cares for us,
that still calls our names.