Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

I first encountered Logan Duarte through Christopher Larkosh’s “Writing the Moment Lusodiasporic” event last June. A two-day event sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and the UMass Dartmouth Department of Portuguese, it brought together Luso-North American writers from throughout Canada and the U.S.

The event was originally supposed to be held in April at the Casa da Saudade Library in New Bedford, but due to the pandemic, it was moved to Zoom in June. The event featured a combination of presentations by writers and cultural agents like Irene Marques, Humberto da Silva, and Emanuel Melo, along with a generative writing workshop led by Carlo Matos.

(Larkosh, who tragically died this past December, served as Logan’s professor and adviser at UMass Dartmouth, and I’d like to dedicate this post to his memory.)

I next saw Logan when we both read for Diniz Borges’ Filaments of the Atlantic Heritage symposium in March 2021. I was impressed with Logan’s poetry, enthusiasm, and scholarship.

One of the poems Logan read during that session was “My Statue,” which he described to me as, “an act of homage towards a man who is the lifeblood of my açorianidade, and a testament to those who have gone before; those whose presence grows stronger in physical absence and gives us the confidence to smile in the rain.” 

Logan is an Azorean Portuguese American writer currently based in Taunton, Massachusetts. His family came from São Miguel Island in the 1960s, which makes him first generation American; although he sometimes jokingly refers to himself as “0.5 generation,” having called Lisbon, Portugal, his home for part of his life.

His writing centers around cultural identity in the Luso-American diaspora and has been a runner-up for the Disquiet International Literary Program’s Luso-American Fellowship (2019) and featured in the Legacy section of the Tribuna Portuguesa (2020). He has a forthcoming set of poems in the upcoming issue of Gávea-Brown, a bilingual journal of Portuguese American letters and studies published by Brown University.

Logan is expected to graduate with a master’s in teaching from UMass Dartmouth in 2021, from which he also received his BA in Portuguese. He also studied at Universidade Católica Portuguesa and Universidade de Lisboa and has taught Portuguese at Milford and Taunton high schools and at Escola Oficial Portuguesa. He will be a graduate Teaching Fellow at UMass Dartmouth beginning his second masters in Portuguese Studies in the upcoming academic year.

Here is Logan Duarte’s “My Statue”

My Statue 

Rain pelts the cobblestone calçada. A utopia turns to a warzone. 

Tourists scatter…I walk 

Knowing all too well the dangerous potential of a slick calçada.  

Some of them slip. Now they know. 

Walking, thinking, unperturbed by the hail of crossfire in which I am caught, I lift my head to see a statue. 

I stop, my eyes examining its unique character. 

It stands firm; the quintessence of gallantry; completely untouched by the bombardment letting loose on the city. 

All else assumes a deep gray despondence, battered by the bombs that fall from the clouds. The streets are barren; a wasteland. 

But the statue stands unscathed. 

Only light shines on this singular obra-prima perfectly guarded in a safe corner of the universe. 

A man stands chiseled out of the finest marble. 

His eyes look directly at me…no one else. 

Below him, a plaque: 

“Ocean-crosser, storm-braver, fearless warrior”. 

Who could it be? 

A hero to the people? A national figure? The sacred one-eyed man? 

No. This is no ordinary statue. This one is only mine. 

I continue walking, still thinking. I still see a statue… 

My statue…my avô. 

The corners of my mouth raise nearly to my ears at the sight of my statue, and the rain clears. Tourists emerge from their hideaways; some still rubbing their bruises. 

Their selfies one shade darker now, 

But my statue remains unscathed. 

It guides me through the warzone—a beacon amidst brume. 

So that when others run, and sometimes slip, 

I walk and think of my statue who in life sacrificed so much 

So that I may not fear the rain. 

And that I may turn my warzone into utopia.

—Logan Duarte

(This poem, used with permission of the author, originally appeared in Tribuna Portuguesa, in a slightly different version.)