FADO: Return of the Sea
Thread drawn from the flesh
Is like a sleeping child softness of the child
Demarcates how far I must look into the distance
Endlessly stripping off a piece of gleaming dolphin skin
Ripples of light sing from birth
Scattering jade blue sundried words
A million years of song await that return
A million years every instant is a cliff
The silvery white of fish bones suddenly penetrates the body
Fine sand diffuses the speed of light underwater
Light from the lamp on the sunken ship’s mast
Night after night plumbs the depth of the heart’s dead seabed
Sing on the locked sea
The wrecks’ love stabs blind the eyes wounds
Ripples of onlookers surround the wound in the home village
Sing a thread of blood in a sexual encounter
Does not deny the child’s pain
Scorched orphan splashed up by the reef at birth
Is shattered and in life is shattered while growing
My focus follows the tides within the name
Growing to maturity goblet with the sea’s bitter saltiness
Always being removed at the edge of the sky
An open louvered window sea gulls
Fly towards it always returning to a single singing voice
100,000 years of brilliance 100,000 clouds
This cloud holds tight a small face burnishing it with gold
To love the sea is to love you and the fate that I swallow
(2014)
(Trans. Mabel Lee)
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