the landless at last
are settled in
full possession of the land:
from landless to
landed: here they’re
interred
their life’s breath
unearthly
earthed
terrified
earth which onto earth
returns
land-holders pleni-
potentiary of a (single
bullet) common grave:
outside in at last
holed deep into
the broad-bellied
acres of the latifundio-
land once barren
so sudden-
ly shown to be most f-
ecund:udder-spawning profit
crop of
reddening blood
un-laboured
labour: here they’re
larvaed at
last
on mortal
remains
coffins laboured
from the scanty timber
(timbre)
of themselves: the assassin bullet
stalks them
thirst-squatting
death-settlers
decumbents cut down pre-
destined for a
meagre (earth) acre a-
grarian
- famine -
re (de)(formed) form
here they are: gregarious
commune share-cropping
nothingness:
shame-
faced in
agony
vexed
- shamecorroded by
inmost abrasive re-
morse-
landless
(‘how shall we extol thee?’)
homeland
laments its dis-
possessed pariahs -
parricide patria
for maybe only at last the
fiery sword
of the crooked angel of his-
tory flam-
ing against the wind and
burning the
agrokilltural cronies of that
sombre sodality where
field-marshal death commands a
grim militia of janissary-gun-
men:
only the angel on the left
of a history groomed against
the grain shall manage with its
multiswirling sword
(if only!) one day to
convoke from the nebulous
mass of days to
come the at last
overriding day of the
just
adjustment of
accounts

1 Editor’s note: Poem originally published in the collection Crisantempo, authorship of Haroldo de Campos (São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1998). Reprinted with the author's permission.