Saudade

means nostalgia, I’m told, but also
nostalgia for what never was. Isn’t it
the same thing? At a café
in Rio flies wreathe my glass.

How you would have loved this: the waiter
sweating his knit shirt dark. Children
loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging
toys and towels to the beach. We talk,

or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view.
Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation:
my imagined you is all I have left of you.

Credit

About this Poem

“Every time I leave the country, I think about the fact that my mother never did. A few years ago I sat down at a café in Rio around that hour when people begin walking across the avenues back to streetcars to go home. It occurred to me the feeling I was having while sitting there—wishing my mother had lived to have had this experience with me—was the perfect expression of saudade, so I wrote the poem.”

—John Freeman

Author

John Freeman

John Freeman is a writer, editor, and literary critic. He is the author of numerous books, including the poetry collection Maps (Copper Canyon Press, 2017).

Freeman was the editor of the literary magazine Granta until 2013, as well as the former president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is an executive editor at Literary Hub, executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf, and the founder and editor of Freeman’s, an annual literary journal. Freeman has taught writing at The New School and is an artist in residence at New York University.

Date Published

10/10/2017