In this dream mosquitos bit through a tropical helmet
and wave on wave into the skull pours the night.
Raise up, raise up the palm’s black leaves,
the sky blood-red from heat – a copper-yellow roof!
Crocodiles – elongated slabs of lead,
like lead thump the hoofs of anxious antelopes.
Where flows the river like a word unbounded,
on to seacoasts, antilles, sudans?
Waters burble, stagnate, below there is no room for breath.
Negroes dry out, propped on idols, ill with sleep,
heaving their slabs of air, washed by water like death.
Along white shores trundle the pale grains of leprosy.
Then weary hands will fast upend the drawer –
from it a waft of fever blows
and seething bubbles flow on hands.
Ever lower sinks the smoke of stifling marshes
and one hears: off lifeless Negroes fall white ashes.
(Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski)
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Based on Topics: Night Poems, Death & Dying Poems, Sleep Poems, Water PoemsBased on Keywords: stagnate, crocodiles, antelopes, elongated, mosquitos, antilles
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