Wild Veins - Amadou Lamine Sall

You came from the North

Where the sun is depleting its

Tears behind the bars of the sky

On the back of the lightning I know

Where you came down to sing

Binding your hair in tufts of millet

And you are waiting on the most divine

Side of your body

Where the gods have

Pushed the strawberry into the mango

You are from that country

Where the swallows have drunk all the suns

And the sky still bent with sleepiness

The wind lifts your name up- Bolero

And your mouth and your infallible lips

Have the languorous aroma of

The honey paths that I love

I love you like a recovery

I love your appeasing throat

The season of your mouth when you laugh

I love the house of your eyes

You warm better that the stomach

Of the bear at midday

You are so beautiful that you defuse

The trajectory of meteors

You are my new book Bolero

The first hieroglyphs of a new millennium

Why do you want to break

The momentum of the mountains?

Why do you want to silence the bird of desire?

For a long time now

And for a long time still

Because you are here

Il is no longer dark in my heart

And I ended up reinventing all theirs

And you ended up being more real than the tale

You will not age

Never will you age in my eyes

Never will I age in your eyes

We will have the same path

And it will be the road of the Earth

It will be the path visible to men's questions

It will be the answer to children's sadness

There will no longer be any secret to love

To sing to dance

Because love dwells in us

Because words gave us their age

Because speech abolished all the silences

And yet Bolero and yet

The Princes of this country have devoured everything

They have stolen and eaten everything

They have eaten the root and

Up to the rocks bordering the root

And in their haste have eaten everything raw

To the last alphabet of this country

And now this country exists only

In the memory and the broken smile of the peasants

I know and you know Bolero

How much these Princes have drained all the seasons of our hopes

They have tortured everything

The totems, the suns, the streams, the peanut fields

The women and the old men

And the adolescents are watches devoid of winding mechanisms

Postcards from a country devoid of Koran and devoid of Bible

But with you Bolero you the loved one the blood of this singing

With you and that love that you carry and

That I carry ever more so

We will defeat the weedy earth

So that LOVE will not be short of one single arm

---

Amadou Lamine Sall (born 1951) Senegal

Translated by James Haenlin

Source: Festival de Poesia de Medellin