Prayer for Peace: II by Léopold Sédar Senghor

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ii

Lord, God, forgive white Europe. 

It is true Lord, that for four enlightened centuries, 

She has scattered the baying and slaver of her mastiffs over my lands

And the Christians, forsaking Thy light and the gentleness of Thy heart 

Have lit their camp fires with my parchments, 

tortured  my disciples, deported my doctors and masters of science. 

Their powder has crumbled in a flash the pride of tatas and hills

And their bullets have gone through the bowels of vast empires like daylight, 

from the Horn of the West to the Eastern Horizon

They have fired the intangible woods like hunting grounds, 

dragged out Ancestors and spirits by their peaceable beards,

And turned their mystery into Sunday distraction for somnambulant bourgeois. 

Lord, forgive them who turned the Askia into moquai- ards, 

my princes into sergeant-majors

My household servants into "boys, 

my peasants into wage-earners, 

my people into a working class. 

For Thou must forgive those who have hunted my children like wild elephants,

And broken them in with whips, 

have made them the black hands of those whose hands were white. 

For Thou must forget those who exported ten millions 

of my sons in the leperhouses of their ships

Who killed two hundred millions of them. 

And have made for me a solitary old age 

in the forest of my nights and the savannah of my days.

Lord, the glasses of my eyes grow dim 

And lo, the serpent of hatred raises its head in my heart, 

that serpent that I believed was dead.

III

Kill it Lord, for I must follow my way, 

and I would  pray especially for France.