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José Luís Tavares
The woman rides the ox through the morning
abyss. What languor and tender delight
in the austere vigilant brow, though
there are gods deposited there
her bushel of insults.

Humble and black, there go he and she,
and the shadow that belongs to them both.
Tell me, António, if it is the ox
of patience or bulimundo
on the way to marriage.

Tell me what torpor or shadow of his
can be guessed in the iris of the woman,
or in the temple of the nuptial bovine.
Tell me, you, whose eyes know
the prodigy that is not repeated,

still having contemplated it one day
transformed you, like the wife of lot,
into a dumbstruck statue in the wasteland
where the first scrape of the cold
set our heart in suffering.

Pray for them, so that for them
the sky darkening at each rotation
may be light, while above resound bells
as they pass the red-hot corner of dusk.

from Paraíso apagado por um trovão [Paradise erased by a thunderbolt]
b. 1967 Cabo Verde
© Instituto Camões, 2007