"Swing Plow" by Mohammed Khair-Eddine

 

Mohammed Khair-Eddine,
photograph by Sophie Bassouls

When the sea salt seen and reviewed

judiciously by the ruin of your tongue—

hearts open to absent millipedes—

when the manure that feeds your life

when the woman and her retinue of lithobies

by these streets where delirium streams

—skulls shattered against the wall, knives unsheathed

by the silence gorged with laughter

from your head that retains nothing from me but my glimmer!...

 

When the city obstructs the sky with the guts

and the vomit of children killed

on the jaundice of my smile—

splendor!

when I repress your fear

with a comma from which oozes your sour blood!...

 

When the country produces its death, standing

on it alone like pomegranate wasps…

when the storm lays down its law to the teapot…

when the wells stink, when najas

drink the mothers’ eye…

 

The South bursts into a thousand rapiers

ruffling your nerves…

and the swing plow exults on the flat stone where errs

a people hung to deleterious stars.

 

This people, do you know it? No! You have only

glimpsed it overturned by a car.

A woman, thin and beautiful, watched the worker

die… His calves brown and salient

against the light on the blood

that flowed on the pavement. The car shone

under the four o’clock sun.

 

The child of the rich played with the river’s mud.

He was happy. The whole summer abused his little and

golden body.

 

The child of the poor, who has never crossed the

mountain,

sang and carved reeds. He paddled and fished

quietly. He was punished.

 

The one you love is a carrier of cloves

and nails and rings and night laughter;

a torrent of pebbles rolls in her clear eyes:

she is the indispensable dress of the day.

 

I know that your license slipped, nude woman, over you..

at the edge of the waves flapped like obese jellyfish.

I know that Time exists,

wearing sabers, sitting on the skin of bitter peoples.

and this brat who glows on your rampage,

o mother!

 

Snakes, scorpions, rats themselves,

all slobbered, stroked my humid wounds.

 

My destiny was debated under the grindstone, a crackling

barley was crushed.

And women sang. An old leper told

his memory to the road, “There is nothing beyond

that mountain”

 

Later, I discovered the world as it is.

 

[From the collection Résurrection des fleurs sauvages Éditions Stouky (1981)]