LITTLE BLACK SOMETHING Poem by Nora-Eugenie Gomringer

You clothe everyone drawn to your pelt.
God, nature is a capricious man
with a fur farm.
Cages full of fools.
Or what's the mother's word for the ones
who didn't flee but ran towards the feed?
When someone's born behind bars
they see everything with a pattern.
And freedom is wild speculation
of feverish new inmates.
At night, when nature sleeps,
your own dreams gnaw.
In them four legs test the forest floor
under their soft pads. By day, then,
night tugs at your tail,
nature pulls the fur over the slumberers' eyes.
Dreamers' Destiny hangs above the shops
in which indulgence from a guilty conscience
can be bought.
It's seldom said
the whole thing isn't worth this.
The little black number now hangs from a collar.
A shadow, a charmer. A puppet.
There's a name for all of them,
it melts Moorishly, bitterly,
has for eternities spoken itself on tongues,
marked with colonial colour:

slaves.