Postcards from the High Seas
I
Crioula, you will tell the guitar
Of the night, and the dawn's small guitar
That you are a dark-skinned bride
with Lela in Rotterdam
You'll never sell around the town
From door to door
The thirst for sweet water that slaps
In a tin can
II
In the morning
It snowed on the temples of Europe
The lamp of my hand is a caravel
Among the fjords of Norway
Since yesterday
It's been raining on the prow
Steel rain that numbs
Our abandoned bones
gnomon of silence without memory
Since yesterday
The ship is the landscape of a blind soul
And your name upon the ocean
the sun in a fruit-tree's mouth
III
I used to sell Kamoca
On the streets of New York
I've played ourin among the girders
Of skyscrapers under construction
In a building in Belfast
Remain the skulls and bones
Of my contemporaries
The blood remains
Alive in the telephones' nostrils
IV
The ears of the islander heard
The sun-drenched voice in the Olympian throat
Of a pestle in Finland
I saw patricians
clad in togas
Speaking Creole
In vast auditoria
Beyond the Pyrenees
there are blacks and blacks
Immigrants to Germany
in the soup-making countries
the blacks of Europe
V
Crioula, on Sunday evenings
with the sun on the bushes
You will say to the good-natured faces
Of old cricket-players
That the names
Of Djone
Bana
Morais
Goy
Djosa
Frank
Morgoda
Paliba and Salibana
Present themselves
as
white stamps on documents
As
passport and laissez-passer
At the doors of the embassies
VI
Our mouths testify
that the earth and the story
Emigrate with us under our tongues
To witness
the dry knees and elbows
of the colony of Cabiri
Along the chemins-de-fer
I give blows and receive them
From neighbouring governments
over land disputes
And cultural norms
In a night of lunacy
In the colony of Sacassenje
We divided the land
Between fruit-trees and seeds
Between blood and scars
Having foreseen this I stayed at the border
Gripping the lock of my door
VII
Now from the road
I watch the birth: the spring that watches
The shade of the shoulder-blades over the world
Striking the drum
with the blood of Africa
with the bones of Europe
And
Every evening my thumb returns
And says to the mouth of the river
From Addis Ababa I came and drank
In the cataracts of Ruacana