Safi Helou
legacy
Have our mothers invented the unit
?Or is she who made them our mothers
We gave birth to silence
?Or just looking for an explanation for this silence
Security is futile prayer for our brothers
In a language they had never learned
Girls About Us
?If we are old before our mothers
?Was it for them that they called our ancestors
Sons of January
The colonist describes them as a column
And gives them the year of their birth according to length
no answer
We descend from men
They do not know when they were born
And women who showed them in the pictures
Their children left the country
Try the passion
They gave birth to girls filled with the wrong language
others
We begin because the worlds that have come before us are over
Sometimes suddenly
And sometimes by combustion
Sometimes we have survived and met
Sometimes I do not survive
Times may become better and maybe not, and feel overwhelmed by the smoky smell
The dead strike roots in strange cities
I wish you would come for a visit
The ghosts are set aside
To give you room in bed
I climb over your sleeping body and wither in the darkness
I kneel and say I'm sorry
He listened to a man patting the strings of a carved and painted oud
The liquid fills me
Wake up, I cry
I will not let you hear the song
Wake up, I pray
I echo the amulet
Without giving you a translation
Personal portrait as a map
And the country only draw a line
Today I draw a thick black line around my eyes
They are a country!
And a thick red line around my lips
They are a country!
The knife that cuts the onions draws a smooth line across my finger
And that country too!
The narrow cloth is a soft purple line in my stomach
When my mother smiled, a small black line appeared for a moment between my front teeth
And for every country lost
Make another country.
Safi Helou is a Sudanese-born poet who was born in America in 1991. She is the recipient of the Silermann Award for best African poetry, dealing with issues of belonging, migration, sexuality and conflict between identities.
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