Pip: Osoparavos.com is a site where the poetry arrives before you’ve had time to brace for it — which is either a gift or an ambush, depending on the day.
Mara: Today we’re sitting with two poems by Adam Donaldson Powell, both written in Portuguese — one about the days when nothing goes right, and one about the kind of exhaustion that leaves a physical mark.
Pip: Let’s start with the poems themselves.
Dias de Cão e Dias de Sal — Two Kinds of Wearing Down
Mara: These two poems share a title structure — days of dogs, days of salt — but they approach suffering from different angles. One is about impatience and pride worn thin; the other is about the slow, physical accumulation of a hard day on a body that carries it.
Pip: “Dias de Cão” opens the pair, and it doesn’t flatter anyone. The poem sets up the image of impatient young people who complain the gods aren’t on their side — then undercuts the posture immediately.
Mara: The poem puts it plainly: “Seus lábios franzidos podem se gabar de indiferença mas as cicatrizes reveladoras de abuso de si mesmo destacam a miséria da derrota.” The pursed lips can boast of indifference, but the self-inflicted scars give the defeat away.
Pip: So the bravado is the tell. The poem isn’t mocking the young — it’s reading the gap between the face someone shows and what the body has already recorded.
Mara: “Dias de Sal” works differently. It builds through accumulation — salt arrives before the sea does. It’s in the rusting gate, the hinge that’s learned the weight of the door, the shirt collar, the skin between shoulder and sleeve. The bus chews standing bodies. Christ stays where the sea breeze doesn’t reach.
Pip: And then the poem arrives at something quieter and harder to look away from — marks on a wrist, described with that same flat inventory: “quatro meias-luas fundas o bastante para amanhecer.” Four half-moons deep enough to last until morning.
Mara: The poem doesn’t explain them. It just notes that rust doesn’t say who feeds it either. The day ends at the beach, a wave erases the footprints — but the salt stays. In the rust, in the skin, in what the body has learned to spend.
Pip: Two poems, one axis: the distance between what we show and what we’ve already absorbed.
Mara: What both poems share is that the body keeps the record even when the face won’t.
Pip: Something to carry into the next episode — what else the site is holding onto.
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