Credo (My Creed)

YOU are a magic, a charm and a qat leaf

The white feather emerging on the dancer's forehead

Who is walking across the two worlds

Like a shadow

He appears and disappears

Two-coloured

And always intoxicated

Bitter his taste

And of drowning heaviness his song

What is love?

What is ecstacy?

What is fire?

Would that the skies were the grass

On which I walk in my trance!

Home to the highest and lowest of souls

What are the motions of this priestess?

What the liquid soul of this snake?

Sea grass is the ground my feet touch

Dancing without a move

Motionless in my being consumed

What is the spirit and where is its land?

The wind and the qat leaf-

That is what I am

I'm throwing a kauri and that kauri is my soul,

A sacrifice to you

In the sweetness of the bitter I rest

Tart and austere is the sweetness of trance

The sky rests in the earth

For the soul is a dancer

That wanders between

The two wordls safely and lost

To Eshu's metamorphoses

You are calling Shango a witness

O wanderer, if you but knew!

I am the qat leaf, the taste and the fragrance

Of tea, mint, kolanut, myrrh

And jasmine

But they, yet

Are nothing of me

Know, my lover, that thousand dear lives

Are sacrificed to Ali

Every day, so let mine and yours be among

What is love?

What is your blood's

Testimony?

No python's poison is as devastating

As the bliss of this love

None is farther from me than myself

But none is nearer than you are

Call everything a lie

And you are right

You sought the mystery

But you found nothing

But rhythm and sound

Names and images

That exist

Through twofold voidness

You found nothing  but a kauri shell

And the dark beauty of trance