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À Triche-Coeur/A Game of Cheat-Heart
Tchicaya U Tam'si
(First published 1960)
This book is out of print.
Equinoctial
The moon spread out
all the blood of a woman
in guise of a holocaust
to the stars of the sea
The moon took the child
of a woman
curling with its blue
light of death
that mother's hair
the swallow their judge
before doing justice
died of love-sickness
The same woman
without eyelashes but a mother in mourning
caressed with her belly
the vegetable kingdom
gathered her forces
and held out against a moon
murderous and accursed
she fought victoriously
dragging at her ankles
a moon in tribute
by equinoctial darkness
discovering in sorrow
three centuries of her life
on the field of her fallow
body where spreads
a galloping grass
ridden by djinns
grass like bayonets
fixed upon the storms
she thought perhaps it was
a grass of the savannahs
merely licentious
the grass showed its claws
it is a vandal grass
the moon is witness
and this grass
engulfing the body
of that woman
the mother strives against it
opening wide her arms
on the field of her body
her musician-sex becoming
black with the ardent sun
the war began
with a hot season of labour
a woman yoked a plough to time
the hairy cannibal night fell open
and two constellations poured into her seed-bag
and toiling followed by migratory birds
burying the sturdy lightning of her steel ploughshare
in the heart of her flesh
she made no way
but
with a stroke of the hand
correcting to the left the bias of the furrow
she made a field of her arms and sowed it
forgetful of the migratory birds
which time brought at her heels
the same woman
changed her steel ploughshare
for a crescent moon
burying the sturdy lightning of her moonshare
in the flesh of her heart
her furrow was a river
the grass sprouted anew
she sang her joy
no fruit had ever matched
the sweet pith of her voice a woman like the day
the opened earth had the sadness of her opened flesh
the opened earth sang together with the river
a woman toils followed by birds
in her heart dies a cannibal night
the dead tremble at each thrust of the blade
her hand is softer than the night upon her soul
and the whip which she curls upon the flank of time beats out a solar march.
that of a mercenary god which shows
the dirty water of a river
singing the liberation of her dream
a woman toils
traces a furrow to write eternity
and sows her stars
along the edge of her body
a child talks alone
