Your Portrait

To report: nothing less than
the kingdom under siege
the sky precarious
relief imminent and legitimate

Nothing except that the cycle of geneses has just without warning
       exploded as well as the life which gives itself
withoutfiliation the barbarous password

Nothing except the shivering spawn of forms liberating themselves
      from facile bondages
and escaping from too premature combinings

imploring hands
hands in orison
the face of the horrible cannot be better indicated
than by these shocking hands

diviner of purple entrails and destiny
reciter of macumbas
my brother
what are you looking for through these forests
of horns of hoofs of wings of horses

all punctate things
all bipunctate things

avatars however of a god keen on destruction
monsters taking flight
in the combats of justice I recognized
the rare laughter of your magical weapons
the vertigo of your blood
and the law of your name.

--Translated by Clayton Eshleman, Annette Smith

Aimé Césaire, a reknowned politician, scholar and poet, was born in 1913 in Martinique. He is perhaps best known for Return to My Native Land (1939), Discourse on Colonialism (1955), and A Tempest (1968), an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Many of his poems are reprinted in Aimé Césaire: Collected Works. With Léopold Senghor, he founded Negritude, an influential movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans, and began the journal Tropiques in 1941.

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