O dark pliant shadow

Ancient wise

Age-old child

Playing around the shal

In the evening

A tired godess

In the morning

A glistening sound

At noon

A forceful artisan

That draws on the earthen jug

Towering

From above the heads of the mountains' gazelles

The silhouette

Of their souls

A celestial bridge

Between man and Allah

WHO poured into the earthen jug

The waters of HIS garden

Shadow's ornaments

In your face

Paint the world

In lucid colours

That radiate in the rhythm

Your heart beats

River and mountain

In the palm of your hand

Speak

With the voice of a sparrow

To God

From mouth to mouth

Your body

Without burden

A sister

To the moon

Showed me the dawn

Of paradise

In wordless rapture

-Spring of time-

A sun of rain water

Washed me heart clean

And flawless

Like a lamb's first fleece

Like a water pearl in your jug

From the crystal falls of honey water

That spring

From underneath your tongue

And make your words

And Nile-born language

As pure as dew

From the dreams of a prophet

That feed the earth

With tenderness

And the child's red heart

With love

A bull's horn caresses

Sun's towring hair

Which in skillfully plaited

Nuba patterns descends

To kiss earth's mouth

In the ecstacy of young morning

And milk flows

From the eyes of the mountains

Ivory-white

The kuul, sky-walking

Eeha-Eeha!

Clad in a pale moon's ashes

The clashing sticks

Beat

The dream rhythm

Of a spirit's ta'aziya

From dusk to dawn

The chalk-white angel

Wrestles with man

And Buraq, the trance guide

Left her foot print

In the kujur's heart

That bears, like an inverted mirror,

The memory of unploughed time

When man was the branch of a tree

In Allah's garden

Then

Before it was named

When earth was sea

Was desert

Was sky

When the mountains were flames

From the tongue of an ancient kahin

Whose faith was an ocean

Unpolluted by shirk

And homeland to a thousand ships

And orbit of a thousand stars

I was but one of them

My earthen soul,

Dance

On the skin of your friend

The shade

As the daughters of Nuba

Sing and dance to the ondo

And the voice that returns

To the shal of which

It was born

Spoke to my sold and desecrated

My mighty, subjugated

Earth:

If there is one corner left

In your innermost

Vastness

Where falsehood

Doesn't

Prevail

Let me die there

A believer

Allah was

A wild flower

In a forgotten valley

Never far

By the banks of the river

In which sky and earth meet

There the kuul

Sky-faced

Wrestles with the angel

Earth-coloured

And I said:

Let me be

The sound

Of your

Ondo

Let me survive

The shadeless fire

That burnt my childhood's cradle

And return

A free man

Let my spirit outlast

Reflection's assault

And temptations

And find back

Myself

In your eyes

Unbetrayed