Édouard Glissant
La maison des sables
Summer, fleeting grace are hidden in this shoreline.
Patient, you wander here free from time
In love with yourselves, left to yourselves
Women, lichens lost when you pass by.
In this love that strips itself of weary dawns
O shoreline, upon which mornings are crimes!
Sands that fly, bringing your beaches to the peaks,
And kites, memories of yesterday thrown to the sky!
Country, when the rains come down in the sun,
Where the forges of water braze a rainbow
After the storm man casts upon the Salt
His quiet shadow and his noiseless hope.
Silence had fled the fervent solitude
Palms! The deserted day swept through the flowers;
Forever between fear and desire, wounded love
Hesitates before blanketing the day.
O night, country of carnage of disgrace,
Of larvae that endlessly predict their future
To the skies where the eternal bird sleeps.
Boats, you wander in stillness
You alone restrain the rough water on your backs,
The place on the shoreline where the gaze fastens.
Are you afraid of the dawn that gleaned the storming fields
Drowned weary on the shroud of the first voice,
To drink the water that grazes at daybreak the beaches
And the earth buried within you too late?
Death beauty glory eternity! labors
Of the sower in the gleaming space, for whom
The Salt succumbs to pain and is perpetually erased.
As at last the word summons your absence
You are sea, like an infant, also like
Woman, in night huts washing the salt.
Sea appeared, guarded by buried gardens
Your face uproots its bird,
Higher than clouds squanders the wheat of the seas.
Orchards, glaciers, impure clay that ferments
Beneath the foam you see this day when I see you
Face become dispossessed tillage.
O the ocean so calm, and calm, this undergrowth!
There the day drowns Passover, its lover.
There the sun rests in sweet cruelties.
Credits
Édouard Glissant, « La Maison des Sables » (in La Terre inquiète), 1965
© 1965, Édouard Glissant
Translated into English by Emma Ramadan