☀ Today's Poem: "To a Coolie" Khal Torabully

If you had come from the sole contradiction
of an open wound in the sea
your exile would just be a rush of blood
to dizzy the islands’ voyaging flesh.

But you come from a memory lost in advance
by a squall’s sudden punch
by a reflex pelvic thrust of sense
a word of distress and silence
a memory forever recalled
in tomorrow’s journey home.

Your death was suspended before your birth
for every woman you’ve never stopped loving.

And this woman is an island with saffron feet
whose blue womb is not a simple barrage
of bougainvillea or anthurium blooms.
SHE is the voice of your story, your life’s void
memoired murmured for mixing of seas
voice consumed by the huge crater of reefs
whose last sigh is a beginning of poems.

You are of mixed descent to drown bloods
to recognize traits superposed
on the placenta’s profound reflection.
You are an artist in need of an image
and your dance is forever
unknown by your roots.

You are a pure nomad of signs
key to your lips to open vertical words,
those that emerge from the very throats of the dead,
you are to be born in the friction of sheets
of our impossible islander syllables.

From these horizons of blood, of garbled words
your heated word capsizes clearness
in my memory’s ocean depths.