There is something about this place. Whether man or woman, it leaves us mystified. Sometimes we walk with our heads down and ears closed Trying to keep from shedding a tear the very next day
Sometimes we walk forward As the sun blinds our very thought of sight Walking in a direction forever aimless While the coastal winds bring the scent of rotten death Washed up along the shores And the evening call to prayer haunts our very conscience Sometimes we desire to leave so much that it pains to crave, Most of the time we want nothing more to do with it. To leave and never come back.
But every time there is this irresistible yearning A lingering nostalgia for frozen minutes, even seconds For the familiarity of dirty hands and tired faces That leave a sigh of unknowing relief The thoughts of endless days Toiling through the heat with nothing to do. The thought of wasting away in acrid sweat While swatting away the madness of flies Who want, like us, nothing more than to find refuge from uncertainty To be so far away, but forgetting why we leave in the first place.
For each day is just like the next Nothing more and nothing less The days become longer and longer Drowning our every desire to move From the shade that keeps us cool And brings us reason when the piss encrusted Stench becomes too putrid to endure Another night of insomniac headlights glaring In man-made city streets with borrowed tears Whispering goodnight to a land forgotten With the moment that failed to stay.
Our ephemeral existence in a place with no ground Maybe, that is the mystery of this place To never truly know one's place Between the everlasting horizon And the deep blue of the shifting sands Where pyramids have been built and disappeared Where sphinx have landed and bred their children Where men have walked with no traces of footsteps left behind Nothing is ever permanent but perhaps For the believer that has carried us this far In God's vast and great land.
Even the idea of love seems to be from a distant imagination Like a lush oasis full of camels guided by strong hands Whose soft caress shapes the endless mounds Of skin-coloured sands shifting in motion As if losing shadows never to be found again
And the next traveler will bury his hurt deep Within the warm comfort of a mother's embrace In silence, so that the sun can rise To know that love is seeing. In this mystical place that breaks our hearts And inspires our soul.
Tu D.
Nov 13, 2002, Mauritania