Fata Morgana Poem by Linda Maria Baros

The floor donkey carries you on his back,
trotting exhausted between the walls,
their whitewashed utopias
-also alive, their petrified troops,
their mobs, their temptations!
He carries you, untiring, as if across a desert.

He throws himself into the bend, aflame,
as if his path were ardently traced
in paraffin.

"Merde!" shout those who come, vertiginously,
the wrong way,
and their voices mingle with the muffled sound
of weaving
that haunts desert, walls, highways...

"Merde alors!" resounds the echo.

And from the window, light, sharpened spear,
reflects upside-down on the floor,
as if in the back of an eye.

It will pierce your rib later.
The donkey throws you in the dunes. And weeps.