Mississipi
Too bad for you men who don’t notice that my eyes remember
slings and black flags
which murder with each blink of my Mississipi lashes
Too bad for you men who do not see who do not see anything
not even the gorgeous railway signals formed under my eyelids by the black and red discs of the coral
snake that my munificence coils in my Mississipi tears
Too bad for you men who do not see that in the depth of the reticule where chance has deposited our
Mississipi eyes
there waits a buffalo sunk to the very hilt of the swamp’s eyes
Too bad for you men who do not see that you cannot stop me from building to his fill egg-headed
islands of flagrant sky
under the calm ferocity of the immense geranium of our sun.
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), best known as co-founder of the Negritude movement in France, was a great mid-century poet in the Surrealist vein. “Mississipi” will be published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press in A. James Arnold’s and Clayton Eshleman’s bilingual edition of Césaire’s Solar Throat Slashed.
