In the midst of places escaping
from the claws of misery
and from the twists of a stagnant, sticky time,
where life is a dead body
hanging from the rope of hatred,
shedding her skin like a serpent in a tropical forest,
there’s nothing but destruction,
nothing but futile death,
a life toasted with the taste of death.
I will be a rock
rolling across the waist of a barren land.
A trunk-less tree
whose leaves are dangling over a hell pit.
A priest packed with insane lust
at the outskirts of the Lord’s bleak wilderness.
A whore with a saggy chest,
offering her body for men to spit on.
I’ll be a barren cloud,
nailed to the sky’s womb.
A widow sobbing behind the veil of darkness.
A faint light writhing in pain
between the night’s jaws.
I’ll be nothing,
a nothingness creeping on the body of existence.
With a pale, gloomy face
like a home of dead spiders;
a gaunt, veiny hand,
like a bark-less tree trunk;
a faint heart,
an aging spirit,
a body bursting with ravage,
and slow, terrified steps—
I’m heading towards my fate
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.