To the Black American Troops

Summer, splendid Summer feeding the Poet on the milk of your
           light.
I who grew up like the wheat of Spring which made me drunk
From the green water, the green streaming in the gold of Time.
Ah! no longer can I tolerate your light, the lamplight,
Your atomic light which disintegrates my whole being.
No more can I tolerate the midnight light.
The splendor of such honors resembles the Sahara,
An immense void with neither erg nor rocky plateau,
With no grass, no twinkling eye, no beating heart.
Day in and day out like this, and my eyes wide open
Like Father Cloarec's, crucified on a boulder by Joal pagans
Who worshipped snakes. In my eyes the Portuguese lighthouse
Turns round and round, day in day out,
A precise and restless mechanism, until the end of time.

I jumped out of bed, a leopard about to be snared,
A sudden gust from Simoun filling my throat with sand.
Ah! if I could just crumple down in the dung and blood in the
          void.
I turn around among my books watching me with their deep eyes.
Six thousand lamps burning twenty-four hours a day.
I stand up lucid, strangely lucid. And I am handsome,
Like the one-hundred meter runner, like the black stallion
Rutting in Mauritania. I carry in my blood a river of seeds
That can fertilize all the plains of Byzance.
And the hills, the austere hills.
I am the Lover and the locomotive with a well-oiled piston.

Her sweet strawberry lips, her thick stone body,
Her secret softness ripe for the catch, her body
A deep field open to the black sower.
The spirit germinates under the groin, in the matrix of desire,
Sex is one antenna among many where flashing messages are
          exchanged.
Love music can no longer cool me down, nor the holy rhythm of
          poetry.

Against this despair, Lord, I need all my might
--A soft dagger in the heart as deep as remorse.
I am not sure of dying. Then this must be Hell: the lack of sleep
This desert of the Poet, this pain of living, this dying
From not being able to die, this agony of gloom, this passion
For death and light like moths on the hurricane lamp at night
In the horrible rotting of virgin forests.

Lord of light and darkness,
You, Lord of the Cosmos, let me rest in Joal-of-the-Shades,
Let me be born again in the Kingdom of Childhood full of dreams,
Let me be the shepherd of my shepherdess on the Dyilor flats
Where dead men gather, let me burst out applauding
When Tening-Ndyare and Tyagoum-Ndyare enter the circle
And let me dance like the Athlete to the drum of this year's Dead.
This is only a prayer. You know my peasant's patience.
Peace will come, the Angel of dawn will come, the singing of birds
Never heard before will come. The light of dawn will come.
I will sleep a death-like sleep that nourishes the poet.
--O You who give the sleeping sickness to newborns,
And to Marone the Woman Poet, to Kotye Barma the Just!
I will sleep at dawn, my pink doll in my arms,
My green and gold-eyed doll with a voice so marvelous,
It is the very tongue of poetry.

--Translated from the French by Melvin Dixon

Leopold S. Senghor is former President of the Republic of Senegal. He, along with Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, is one of the originators of the Négritude Movement. Senghor, a prolific poet and essayist, is a member of the Academie Franciase. His Collected Poetry, edited by the late Melvin Dixon, appeared in 1991.

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