June Jordan - Poem for South African Women 汉译

Commemoration of the 40,000 women and children who, august 9, 1956, presented themselves in bodily protest against the “dompass” in the capital of apartheid. Presented at The United Nations, August 9, 1978.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands

by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land

into new dust that

rising like a marvelous pollen will be

fertile

even as the first woman whispering

imagination to the trees around her made

for righteous fruit

from such deliberate defense of life

as no other still

will claim inferior to any other safety

in the world

 

The whispers too they

intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit

now aroused they

carousing in ferocious affirmation

of all peaceable and loving amplitude

sound a certainly unbounded heat

from a baptismal smoke where yes

there will be fire

 

And the babies cease alarm as mothers

raising arms

and heart high as the stars so far unseen

nevertheless hurl into the universe

a moving force

irreversible as light years

traveling to the open eye

 

And who will join this standing up

and the ones who stood without sweet company

will sing and sing

back into the mountains and

if necessary

even under the sea:

 

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

 

                                                      1980