You are destined to go;
Today, tomorrow,
or the day after.
No one can halt the heavy wheel of destruction
running over life’s body.
It’s all in vain
no last-minute savior will come
and rescue the world’s body.
It’s all in vain
no flash of light,
to scare away the darkness.
Everything is dying:
Time. Language.
Screams. Dreams.
Songs. Love. Music.
All in vain.
Everything is gone,
except a violent vacuum
dead bodies wrapped in melancholic silence
and a heavy downpour of destruction.
Abdel Wahab Yousif, better known as Latinos, was a South Sudanese poet. He died in 2020 when a rubber boat carrying African immigrants sank into the sea shortly after setting off from Libya on its way to Europe.
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These poems were translated from Arabic into English by Adil Babikir, a Sudanese translator and copywriter based in the UAE. His published translations include Mansi: a Rare Man in his Own Way by Tayeb Salih (Banipal Books, 2020); Modern Sudanese Poetry: An Anthology (University of Nebraska Press, 2019); The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth, a novel by Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin (Africa World Press, USA, 2015); Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan, (Red Sea Press, USA, 2016); Summer Maze, a collection of short stories by Leila Aboulela, translated to Arabic (Dar al-Musawarrat, Khartoum, 2017). Babikir is a contributing editor of Banipal Magazine. Some of his translations appeared in Banipal, The Guardian, Al-Doha magazine, and Jalada Africa. His forthcoming works include a collection of Sudanese short novels and a book on the legendary Bedouin poet al-Hardallo.