Il is now three o’clock

in this twentieth Century.

Nothing separates strollers’ shoes

from corpses

save a sheet of asphalt.

I will recline in the middle of the street

as the old bedouins do

and refuse to rise

till all prison bars,

all records of suspects in the world,

have been collected

and set before me so I can chew them,

like a camel by the roadside,

till all policemen and demonstrator’s sticks

top from their hands and become once more

flowering branches in their forests.

I laugh in the dark,

I cry in the dark,

I write in the dark.

I can no longer distinguish mi pen from my fingers.

Every time a doorbell rings

or a curtain flutters,

I hide my papers with my hands

like a whore, during a police raid.

Who willed me this dread,

this blood dismayed like a mountain leopard?

A printed from lying on the threshold,

a cap glimpsed through the barely opened door,

are enough to set my bones clattering with my tears

while my frightened blood flees in all directions,

as though the eternal squad of generations

were chasing it, from artery to artery.

O my beloved, it is useless to search

for strength and courage.

The tragedy is not here, in the whip

or in the offices, or in warning sirens.

It is over there,

in the cradle…in the womb.

For I was not tied to the womb

with an umbilical cord, 

but with the hangman’s rope.