ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a poem 'Testament', originally appeared in book Minha senhora de que. The late 1980s and early 1990s were when feminist studies started to emerge in Portugal, and it was regarded then as a foreign and strange subject, in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1974 and the new constitution of 1976, which established equality between men and women before the law. Since then, major advances had been achieved on issues relating to gender and sexuality. Poetry, because it contradicts power and rebuilds worlds within itself, is a counter-diction and can be an acute mechanism of resistance and an enhancement of human strength, able to reinforce an ethics and a poetics of affection, divergent from the idea of a high literature, related to universal subjects, or even from the concept of the sublime as an aesthetic quality. In that sense, the poem holds its own story, deflected, refracted, because it is the story of the poem.
