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Your hair,
for some,
was the devil’s mischief from hell; but the hummingbird
built its nest there, with no reservations,
when you were hanging at the end of the pole, opposite
the Governors General’s Palace.
Indeed, they said, that the dust of the road made you disloyal and purplish,
like those winter flowers of the tropics, always
so stunning and arrogant.
Now that you are dying,
they suspect that your smile was briny and your moss beyond the touch of love. Others state that your ancestral spirits brought on us that gloomy
curse
which does not let us shine back at Europe and which thrusts us, in the ritual
vortex, into that impossible rhythm
of the unmentionable drums.
We shall love forever
your footprints and your courage of bronze for you have brought us that bright
light from the fluid past,
that pain of having entered clean into battle, that simple love for bells and rivers,
that breath of freedom in spring which runs toward the sea to return
and take off once more. (from Piedra pulida, 1986)
Translated by Gabriel A. Abudu
