Poetry Translation Centre

Emigrant

by Corsino Fortes

Every evening, sunset crooks
its thumb across the island
And from the sunset to the thumb
there grows
a path of dead stone
And this peninsula
Still drinks
All the blood of your wandering body
From a tenant farmer’s cup

But when your voice
becomes a chord on the shore’s guitar
And the earth of the face and the face of the earth
Extend the palm of the hand
From the seaward edge of the island
A palm made of bread
You will merge your final hunger
with your first

From above there will come
The faces and prows of not-voyage
So that herbal and mercury
Extract the crosses from your body

The screaming of mothers carries you
now
To the seventh corner
where the island is shipwrecked
where the island celebrates
Your daughter pain
The pain of a woman in childbirth

So that all parting is power in death
All return a child’s learning to spell

No longer do we wait for the cycle
Pulp from good fruit, fruit from good pulp
The earth
breathes in
your green speech

And there before your feet
Should be
A tree on a hill


And your hand
Should sing
A new moon in my heart

Go and plant
in dead Amilcar’s mouth
This fistful of watercress
And spread from goal to goal
A fresh phonetics
And with the commas of the street
and syllables from door to door
You will sweep away before the night
The roads that go
as far as the night-schools
For all departure means a growing alphabet
for all return is a nation’s language

They await you
the dogs and the piglets
at Chota’s house
grown thin from the warmth of the welcome

They await you
the cups and semantics of taverns

They await you
the beasts
choking on applause and sugarcane

They await you
faces that explode
on the blood of ants
new pastorals to cultivate

But
when your body
of blood and lignite, on heat

Raises
over the harvest
Your pain
And your orgasm
Who didn’t know
Who doesn’t know
Emigrant
That all of parting is power in death
And all return is a child learning to spell