Before the new day, the songs walked in secret, whispered by voices that knew how to wait, carrying in their pockets the promise of a clean morning. They were songs with the smell of exile and contained gunpowder. They were the blossoming blood of a suspended time.
Then came the dawn of April. And the silence burst into a thousand voices. The country learned to scream, sometimes excessively, sometimes tenderly. The freed words ran through the streets like rivers that had long sought the sea. The song, which was once a seed, became a hoe and a flag, a hammer and a hug. It was played everywhere — in squares, in factories, in improvised assemblies — and the people recognized themselves in the echo of their own scream.
The melody became a manifesto, bread shared, an oath of land. Music became the face of what they wanted to build — a country of equals, a common home. But it also brought the vertigo of excess: the desire to change everything quickly, to transform the dream into a decree. And, in this fervor, the voices that previously sang side by side began to fall out of tune with each other. Freedom, just born, was already showing its price — that of difference.
Even so, it was time to walk. There were improvised stages, songs written in pencil, rehearsals in the early hours of the morning. The song was a weapon and a consolation. Each chorus taught how to breathe after fear. The people joined together, without conductors, in an awkward but sincere choir, where each person sought their own tone. And if the country was divided into certainties, music continued to be the common territory, where utopia and doubt, fury and affection had room.
Some voices wanted to lift the world with their fist; others sought to save the tenderness among the stones. There were those who shouted revolution and those who just asked for a little sun for the open windows. Between the iron and the wine, between the hoe and the guitar, a portrait was drawn of a country in transit, between the ground and the horizon.
The music continued, sometimes lyrical, sometimes combative, saying that freedom is more difficult to sustain than to conquer. That justice is not just achieved through big words, but through small gestures. That a song can set fire, but also heal.
As time passed and from the early hours of November, the echo of the revolution became a memory, until the present. Some melodies were stuck to the calendar, others were able to cross time and still speak to us today, as if the past were a mirror in which the present can be recognized. They are the same voices that once said “enough is enough”, and now, more serenely, whisper “still”.
Between blackheads and scars, the country learned that utopia is not a destination, but a path. That freedom needs to be tuned, every day, like a guitar that never stops.
And so, the songs continue, because they are the same ones that were born from clandestinity and hope, now less inflamed, but deeper. They sing about what we were and what we still want to be – a people who don’t give up listening to each other.
After all, each song is a piece of blood in bloom, that is, the living memory of a country that dreams, falls, gets up and sings. Still and always!
*Grand Essay Prize from the Portuguese Writers Association