Underground

Deep and sound

Sound and depth

Deep

In the ground

In the ghostly fog

Of slave ships sunk

Glows the submarine sun

Of identities

Raped

And bastardised beauty

Sold

Betrayed

Defamed

Claims

Its name

And true descend

Caught in a suburban void

Like in a net

Baptized in foreign tongues

In the townships

Brought down to the lowest

It struggles

In the womb of slavish rebellion

To be born

Cruzified by the whip

In the Americas

Remoulded in the image

Of the conqueror

In Africa

And reborn as its caricature

Remade into shadowy sleeves

Of extinct memory

In Asia

And invaded to the blood

Kept in scientific ignorance

And deprived of all we are

Everywhere

Everywhere

Soul and mind burn

Creolised

Self-despised

By the herb

Tranquilised

Suffering in

The ancestral rhythm

Of wind and sea

Modernised

Under the cross

Crying out

For Ogun, Oya and Shango

On bone-white Antillian beaches

And in the sluggishly fast-sharp Carribeans

Suppressed and sanguine

Irrepressible hatred

Covered up

In vitality

O zest for life

And love of zest

A master forger

Cursed and blessed

You forge blindness

For yur own quest

And from the nights

The bird of passion

Ascends like a drunk tight rope walker

Clinging alertly

With albescent madness

To the bones of ancestral pain

Deep on the grounds of the sea

And just one step underneath

Rests the gold of Ife and Sheba

And in the midst of the darkness

And the tomb-stone-like dumbness

This bird of the stars

Pearl-diving and wandering the sea

Driven by divinity

Pronounces he words: Aztlan

And: Mandingo

And: The Golden Age

Half-aware of their meaning

And deeper than himself

And from bones, sea weed

And reef corals

The universe swings up its sigh

And its fulfillment's load

Enriched by the rebirth of longing:

Es possible que yo,

Subdito de Yaaqub Al Mansur

Muera como tuvieron que morir

Las rosas

y Aristoteles?