Aimé Césaire
from Soleil cou coupe (Solar Throat Slashed)
Translated by Clayton Eshleman and A. James Arnold

Rain

After I had by iron by fire by ash visited the most celebrated places in history after I had by ash fire earth and stars courted with my wild dog and leech-like fingernails the authoritarian field of protoplasms

I found myself as usual in the old days in the middle of a factory of vipers’ nests in a ganges of cacti in an elaboration of thorny pilgrimages—and as usual I was salivated by limbs and tongues born a thousand years before the earth—and as usual I made my morning prayer the one that protects me from the evil eye and that I address to the rain under the aztec color of its name

Rain who so gently washes a perverse injection from the earth’s academic vagina

All-powerful rain who on the chopping block makes the fingers of the rocks leap

Rain who force-feeds an army of worms no mulberry forest could nourish

Rain inspired strategist who pushes across the mirror of the air your zigzag army of numberless riverbanks that cannot not surprise the best-kept boredom

Rain wasp nest beautiful milk whose piglets we are

Rain I see your hair which is a perpetual explosion of sandbox tree fireworks your hair of misinformation promptly denied

Rain who in your most reprehensible excesses takes care not to forget that Chiriqui maidens pull suddenly from their night corsage a lamp of thrilling fireflies

Inflexible rain who lays eggs whose larvae are so proud that nothing can make them mount the stern of the sun and salute it like an admiral

Rain who is a fresh fish fan behind which courteous races hide to watch victory with its dirty feet pass by

Greetings to you rain queen in the depths of the eternal goddess whose hands are multiple and whose destiny is unique thou sperm thou brain thou fluid

Rain capable of everything except the washing away of the blood that flows on the fingers of the murderers of entire peoples surprised in the soaring forests of innocence

 

Unmaking and Remaking the Sun

dwelling made of one knows not what saint to pray to
dwelling made of saber glitter
dwelling made of cut necks
dwelling made of rainstorms of the deluge
dwelling made of male harmonicas
dwelling made of green water and female ocarinas
dwelling made of fallen angel feathers
dwelling made of the wisps of little laughs
dwelling made of alarm clocks
dwelling made of animal skins and of eyelids
dwelling made of mustard seeds
dwelling made of fan fingers
dwelling made of piles of weapons
dwelling made of a rain of little eyelashes
dwelling made of an epidemic of drums

what would we look like on not defying the sea with a step more resounding than our frog-like hearts

Dwelling made of chicken droppings
dwelling made of poison sumac
dwelling made of feathers for a hummingbird crown

Jailer don’t you see that my eye forever clenched in my fists cries out that my stomach once again rises to my throat and feeds it a swarm of roaches born of its milled saburra?

Beautiful intimate angel usury mine yours forgiveness is a toady to be banned from our sight but my anger alone brings me the bouquet of your odor and its fistful of keys.

Powerful of her be born as of her I am born at daybreak.

Jailer my fists clenched, here I am, my fists clenched here I am in my dwelling in your face

Dwelling made of your imortence of the power of my simple acts of freedom of my spermatozoa
dwelling black womb hung with a red curtain sole altar I may bless while watching the world
explode at the option of my silence