Song of Silence
A carnival passes through me violently.
My ears barely digest what was heard
in the slow machine shop where words are chewed on.
My gums bleed mutely
colored thus from pure voraciousness—
it’s like death in the wastelands of immense spring.
Beyond the flower of your perfume,
there’s the wasp and its rough stinger.
My cry of pain and calm,
the same one that leaks thickly from my eyes,
imitates the voice of the crickets.
Friend, you should learn now
that the cricket doesn’t die singing.
Never.
Inside it lives a wound without remedy
that opens in your womb
a cut born from within
that rips to shreds the entrails.
In your womb live unfathomable fears.
And a cut that bleeds profusely.
Every cricket, like me,
dies screaming!
Asé
I am a tree with a thick trunk.
My root is strong,
knotty, originating,
tarry like the night.
Blood, the ejé animals
to be sacrificed who run warily,
the powerful womb of my orixás.
Each of them gives us to eat
a potent granule
of what I am
with a dark faith.
A blot in the writing of the god
whose eyes are sweetly blue.
My faith is black,
and my soul blackens the earth
in the orixá’s bray
that escapes from my mouth.
I am a black tree that escapes from the gnarled root.
I am a deep river, calm and silty.
I am the arrow and its reach before the scream.
And also the fire, the salt in the waters, the tempest
and the iron inside the arms.
And I still contend in hours of dull sun
at the crossroads.
*
Translator’s note: From the Yoruba word, axé or ase means vital power. As an interjection within the religion of candomblé, asé may mean “May the gods will it to be so.” Lastly, asé may refer to the house of worship in candomblé, populated by a pantheon of nature-based divinities, the orixás.