COUNTRY -EDOUARD GLISSSANT We raged at your holds the wind peopled Your high rails for counting the bodies We spelled out our herd of cries from the wind You who know how to read around the landscape of words where we wandered Detached from us who cry out our blood to you And on this bridge hail the trace of our feet Let us sing praise to the foam as well as to the manatees Spirits of abyss and alluvium how We uproot the Open and encroach on all that is Unique You who know how, in our filth and our blood, to bury the writing In which so many prophetic fissures star into night. An expanse of tar oozes around the sweet grasses Which is it, this country that strives through seeding and salting This mild senseless speech, of reddish stars Between stones of water and green of depths What are you rending, knotted with flax where thickly foam up The magnets of the mountains and pure diamonds and what Word pierces through for you, finds its south We breathe this country that is drying up inside us, the country Stretches out from such a dream in which no water makes a sound Let us shout, “Like the wind, also the past,” for this cry Is broken with sugar, a parable of a mill in this country ____________________________________________ -From ‘Dream Country, Real Country’ in The Collected Poems of Edouard Glissant. Trans. Jefferson Humphries and Melissa Manolas. Un. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 12:09:29 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015