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| 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)]
