From afrika (africa) 1998
translated by Susan Schwartz Senstad and the writer
I’m writing before darkness disappears
for my african life
each white day in snowy months
each night in black reminiscence
I’m writing so as not to disappear
into the depths of snow, the icy white light
I’m writing wings and flight
a stork, a heron, ibis, snake falcon
I’m writing wider and bluer
than thought circling to the sea
I’m writing in your glance my silhouette
a strip of peachy light, a sunken sun
I write the sound of twilight blue
in the window I lean toward as to a thought
I write the crystalline law of freezing
I write the wound in the inner africa.
I write a winter’s sorrow with great quantities of snow
packed down in layers harder and harder
around my dark twin
black figures in ceremonial procession against the snow
in slow nearly still strides
carrying simple wooden caskets filled with skulls
over the white patches of consciousness
where no jungles, riverbeds or peaks are mapped
where so many tribes have been annihilated
and sorrow is a white requiem that will never cease.
I write a statue, black
in silhouette against the blue ridge
where light patches drift like cattle
across my retina
I am an old notion
under my black skin
no woman
I carry the remnants of forgotten memories
I serve as a mask in many rituals
I invoke the gods with guttural cries
and stamp the red earth
with hard foot soles
I write a sculpture of ice
in January’s hypersensitive sun rays
when the planet arches its back to the north
and the light’s ascending power has scorched
my pupil
so my eye is open, dark and sighted
I am many creatures in one being
wandering from here to the oldest of times
the same at the beginning
as when all is at an end.