Return to my Native Land

The master of laughter? The master of fearful silence? The master of hope and despair? The master of idleness? The master of dance? It is I!

You are here and I will not make my peace while the world is on your backs.

I am nothing but a man who accepts, there is no more anger (he has in his heart only an immense love which burns)

To prescribe at last this unique race free to produce from its tight intimacies the succulence of fruit.

But at the execution let my heart preserve me from all hate / do not make me that man of hate for whom I have only hate / I was born of this unique race / yet knowing my tyrannical love you know / it is not by hatred of other races that I prosecute for mine.

Listen to the white world appallingly weary from its immense effort the crack of its joints rebelling under the hardness of the stars listen to the proclaimed victories which trumpet their defeats listen to their grandiose alibis (stumbling so lamely) pity for our conquerors, all-knowing and naïve.

Free from the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world. Truly the eldest sons of the world.

Those who explored neither sea nor sky but without whole the earth would not be the earth.

Twenty times over in the tepid warmth of your throat you will develop and entertain the same poor comfort that we are no more than mutters of words and you do it in vain.

The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning: the end of the World, no less.

It’s you, burden of an insult and a hundred years of the whip. A hundred years of my patience, a hundred years of my effort simply not to die.

And the woman who had a thousand names / fountain and sun and tears / and her hair like a young fish / and her steps my climates / and her eyes my seasons / days without harm / nights without offence / stars of confiding / wind of complicity

Not a corner of this world but carries my thumb-print and my heel-mark on the backs of skyscrapers and my dirt in the glitter of jewels! Who can boast more than I?

I want to rediscover the secret of great speech and of great burning. I want to say storm. I want to say river. I want to say tornado. I want to say leaf, I want to say tree. I want to be soaked by every rainfall, moistened by every dew. As frenetic blood rolls on the slow current of the eye, I want to roll words like maddened horses like new children like clotted milk like curfew like traces of a temple like precious stones buried deep enough to daunt all miners. The man who couldn’t understand me couldn’t understand the roaring of a tiger.

And my strange father nibbled by a single misery whose name I’ve never known, my father whom an unpredictable witchcraft soothes into sad tenderness or exalts into fierce flames of anger.

At the end of the small hours, this town, flat, displayed… it crawls on its hands without the slightest wish ever to stand up and pierce the sky with its protest.

Its coming was first felt in the prickling of desires, a thirst for new tenderness, the budding of vague dreams, then suddenly it took wing in the violet silk rustle of its great wings of joy, and over the borough it plunged down and burst open the life inside the huts like an over-ripe pomegranate.

like a woman whose lyrical walk you have noticed but who suddenly calls upon a hypothetical rain and commands it not to fall