Wifredo Lam . . .

hullo hullo one more night stop guessing it's me the cave man there are cicadas which deafen both their life and their death there also is the green water of lagoons even drowned I will never be that color to think of you I left all my words at the pawn shop a river of sleds of women bathing in the course of the day blonde as bread and the alcohol of your breasts hullo hullo I would like to be on the clear other side of the earth the tips of your breasts have the color and the taste of that earth hullo hullo one more night there is rain and its gravedigger fingers there is rain putting its foot in its mouth on the roofs the rain ate the sun with chopsticks hullo hullo the enlargement of the crystal that's you...that is you oh absent one in the wind an earthworm bathing beauty when day breaks it is you who will dawn your riverine eyes on the stirred enamel of the islands and in my mind it is you the dazzling maguey of an undertow of eagles under the banyan

--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.

...