Like others I get drunk in my blood
hiccuping and await the souls of my brothers
perennially on the song composed by the heliotrope heart
at midstream where the spirits walk
undisturbed!
excellent then, this sudden shower of locusts
expanse of cortege and the two roads
of the cemetery where time has its teeth
in the flesh of a mother who oxidizes her soul
with the waters of the passion-flower
as May is a brother just as October was a brother
linked to the prodigal who declares:
Mother I want to return into exile to be your poet!
hearing this, my mother seized by an element of nature
wondering whether I am going or staying seeing the roads
in my eyes, turns a terra-cotta sister and her hair
once black illuminates the night with its premature whiteness
my mother prevents my flight into myself
speaking to me through her silence through the beat of her heart
being that she loves me that she is always herself double
the sword fighting my days the lamp lighting my nights
when my heart sinks deep in the oasis
of its pain! she rejuvenates me calling back the me
that has died tracing the man-child to the poet
without understanding the dictates of my soul
*
blood absent from my soul my dog-starved days
on the peninsula of my Sierra Leone
my legacies which I counted in five carcasses
dancing drunk in the terrible summers
and that cruel winter polyphonic in verse
when I loved that woman without first learning how to live
I bled one night shedding poems from my heart!
It is recorded then: I’ll die in exile!
thinking of my Sierra Leone
this country which has made me a poet
this country which has honoured me
with the two knives of my death passed crisscross
through my heart
so that I can say to a bleeding mother:
Mother I am returning into exile to be your poet!
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