Black Stone

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Begin with the colors,
Complement of the light,
Formidable dominion
Of the night and of nothingness.
And among the colors first
Choose the red of blood,
Testimony of the vanquished
To the subjugation and the torture.
Then with shining eyes tell me
If the fall of being into the void
Doesn't seem too serious, like undeserved
Punishment, if the price of experience
Doesn't seem too high, if the forgetfulness
Of reason doesn't seem ignoble;
If in the search for a more certain courage,
Where justice is a great communal fire,
Rage doesn't know or want to be silent.
For Baghdad cries out and Gaza cries out:
Make this fire, of courage and justice
Mixed with rage, stamp on and undo the flags,
Burn the sad stars,
The stars and stripes of the filthy beast.
Then you tell me, with shining eyes and
A half-hidden smile, words
I don't understand because a distance
Removes the clear sense of the true word
And makes our heart and the open road
To the heart of the earth grow dark,
And thought in the hands becomes blood,
And the blood, black stone.
Seneca, you madman, the rage of negated
People is natural and just,
For they arrive at it calmly,
Nor does it kill them with their judgment
But it lives and they live in the beautiful
Eyes and teeth of a little girl of Chiapas
Who in the Zocalo of San Cristobal de las Casas
Or behind the mountains clear up to Simojovel
Where the tourists go in search of amber,
With brothers and sisters and her grandmother
--bare feet, black stone-- at the edges
Of the global market of blood,
Of a parasitic and murderous liberty,
She, the little girl, doubly negated,
Who finds neither her ancient forest history
Nor the dignity of a new existence
For herself and her people, forced
To sweat for nothing, precious shadows
Of hard labor and memory.

Bruno Gulli,
Paris, December 98
from Figures of a Foreign Land (San Francisco: Deep Forest, 2001)
Translated by Jack Hirschman