Letter to a Poet by Leopold Sédar Senghor

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to Aimé Césaire

To the Brother I love and the friend, my blunt, fraternal greeting! 

The black gulls, the far-travelling canoe-masters have brought me some taste of your news

Mingled with spices, with the fragrant sounds of the Rivers of the South and the Islands.

They have told of your standing, the prominence of your forehead and the flower of your subtle lips 

They say that your disciples are a hive of silence, a peacock's fan 

And till the moon's rising you hold them, breathless and keen. 

Is it your perfume of fabulous fruits or the bright wake behind you at height of noon?

So many wives dark-skinned as sapodilla in the harem of your mind!

Across the years it holds me, the live coal, 

Under the ash of your eyelids, your music we reached out hands and hearts to long ago.

Can you forget your nobility, which is to sing 

The Ancestors the Princes the Gods (they are not flowers nor drops of dew)? 

It was your duty to offer the Spirits white fruits from your garden

(You ate only flour of fine millet, ground from the same year's harvest)

Stealing not a single petal to sweeten your mouth. 

At the bottom of the well of my memory, I touch 

Your face and there draw water to freshen my long regret. 

Royally you lie at length, propping your elbow on the cushion of a bright hill,

And the earth labours gently under the weight of your couch 

In the flooded plains the drums beat out your song, and your verse is the breathing of the night and the distant sea.

You sang the Ancestors and the legitimate princes 

You plucked out of the sky a star for a rhyme

Syncopating the rhythm; at your bare feet the poor cast down as mats the earnings of a year 

And the women cast down at your bare feet their hearts of amber and the dance you dragged from their souls.

My friend my friend-Oyou will come back you will come back! 

I will wait for you-I have given the message to the master of the cutter-under the kaicedrat.

You will come back at the feast of the first fruits. When the sweetness of evening smokes on the roofs as the sun declines 

And the athletes parade their youth, decked like bridegrooms, it is fitting that you should come.