Background

Poetry

Sunday,

The crowding stony faces of my fellows make me afraid.

Out of my tower of glass haunted by headaches and my restless

Ancestor

I watched the roofs and hills wrapped in mist

Wrapped in peace. The chimneys are heavy and stark.

At their feet my dead are sleeping, all my dream made dust

All my dreams, blood are sleeping, all my dreams made dust

All my dream, blood freely split along the street, mingled with blood from butcheries

And now, from this observatory, as if from the outskirts of the town

I watch my dreams listed along the streets, sleeping at the foot of the hills

Like the forerunner of my race on the bank of the Gambia and Salum

Now of the seine, at the foot of the hills.

Lets my mind turn to my dead!

Yesterday was All Saint, the solemn anniversary of the sun

In all the cemeteries, there was no one to remember.

O dead who have always refused to die, who have resisted death

From the sine to the seine, and in my fragile vein you my

unyielding blood

Guard my dreams as you have guarded your sons, your slender- limbed wanderers

O dead, defend the roofs of Paris in the Sabbath mist

Roof that guard my dead

That from the dangerous safety of my tower, I may go down into the

street

To my brother whose eyes are blue

Whose hands are hard.