I know what blood is, I know.
Once I saw it pouring from my mother's knees
on a lonely street where so many people
swarmed than they didn't see my tears of frightened child.
Since then it keeps me awake and besieges me
as an indeleble trace over the world's forehead,
over this precise broken hour when it is blown up
among shattered cities and clatters, distant
and terrible like the first blood.
Its redness is blended in the soot and dust of paths
and days that lead us
to dark passageways of everyday horrors,
is blended in the grievous saliva, in the skin
that is teared off in tiny pieces or open relentlessly.
Who lifts my mother from the ground
and cleans her wounds from a life pushing
till dropping on your knees without a word?
Who dries the tears from the boy
crying among the uproar as the blood flows
on the skin that snuggles and rocks him?
The other's blood is not your blood, they say,
crying and moaning don't heal wounds, they say.
Others bleed before, others mourned inconsolably, they say.
Others fell on their knees into the clash
of thousands of battles, on a lonely corner,
crowded of voices and unintelligible noises,
with a child who cried clinging to a hand falling.
I don't know. I don't know.
I only know that the whole spilled blood
is the horror of the blood in my mother's knees.
