I am the man,
I suffered,
I was there.
— Whitman

Strikers of Sierra Leone
guided by your darkness when they put out the light
the yokes of your shoulders, your mirrors that reflect
your docility that kills with tenderness
strikers when the streets give birth to teargas
the jails to children the hospital to the wounded
your pedestrian sagacity that speaks without polishing
your words, without the aromatic lies, the napes
of your necks gleaming with the vehemence waiting
to be born; for you the chimeric books quote
their puerile laws, the gun its smoke
the gallows its rope, the brute its strength
the mortuary its linen of red blood
and the cemetery its prodigious appetite
to love wholeheartedly your vegetable hearts!

workers of the bronchial, the tubercular
siphoning your petrol from the granite
without rancour without the hate that is born of hate
workers shoeing your soles with your carapace
before marching towards their paltry years
before they counted the dead of the streets
the dead of the woman the dead of the child
sucking and then dying on the dried-out meat
professors of my country closing your books
professors of symmetry of the logic of all logics
snivelling before the avuncular, the otiose
the gunpowder was singing, I tell you, seeing them suffer
cooking the rice that grew its grain of sawdust
the tomato its paste of vampire blood, I know,
lawyers of my country eyeing your diamonds
your parliamentary seats opposing their votes
these workers belying the calm of the sea
the grandiloquent tapestry of Sierra Leone!

fertile of the rustic bread whipping below the stomach
cannons of the dregs, these cactus growths at the summit
of their hunger, telling me with garlic sweat with poison gas
O granulated dreams! O threadbare future!
O toxic feats of the master!
Nero amidst the lean spewing his potassium vomit!
meanwhile workers of Sierra Leone proceeding to your analysis
the true beginning of every joy measured by the mistrial
proceeding in alphabet without the captive noun
dolorous brothers of the order of the pascal lamb
the passover will come, the night that widens the fjord
until then, you wait, you march, you suffer, I see,
witness of your souls holding the horn of your unicorn.