Zebu - Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo

Arched like the towns of Imerina

prominent on the hills,

or hewn from the living rock;

humped like the gables

sculpted by the moon on the earth,

look! The powerful bull—

scarlet like the colour of his blood.

He has drunk at the river banks,

He has grazed on cactus and lilac;

Look how he crouches before the manioc

still heavy with the scent of the earth,

and before the rice straw

smelling strongly of sun and shadow.

Evening has deepened everywhere,

there is no more horizon,

and the bull sees a desert extending

to the frontiers of night.

His horns are like a crescent

that rises.

Zebu cattle, Madagascar
(Wikimedia Commons)

Desert, desert,

desert before the powerful bull

that has gone astray with the evening

in the kingdom of silence,

what do you evoke in his somnolence?

Is it this kind that have no hump

And that are red like the dust

Scattered at their passing,

they, the masters of uninhabited lands?

Or his ancestors flattened by the peasants

And led to the town, adorned with ripe oranges,

To be slaughtered in honour of the King?

He leaps, he bellows,

He who will die without glory,

Then sleeps again, waiting

And he seems like a hump of the earth.

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Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo (1901 - 1937) Madagascar

Translated by Leonard Fox

Source: Global Literature in Libraries