New York
New York! At first I was confused by your beauty, by
those great golden long-legged girls.
So shy at first before your blue metallic eyes, your frosted
smile
So shy. And the anguish in the depths of skyscraper streets
Lifting eyes hawkhooded to the sun's eclipse.
Sulphurous your light and livid the towers with heads that
thunderbolt the sky
The skyscrapers which defy the storms with muscles of
steels and stone-glazed hide.
But two weeks on the bare sidewalks of Manhattan
- At the end of the third week the fever seizes you with the
pounce of a leopard
Two weeks without rivers or fields, all the birds of the air
Falling sudden and dead on the high ashes of flat rooftops.
No smile of a child blooms, his hand refreshed by my hands.
No mother's breast, but only nylon legs. Legs and breasts
that have no sweat nor smell.
No tender word for there are no lips, only artificial hearts
paid for in hard cash
And no book where wisdom may be read. The painter's
palette blossoms with crystals of coral.
Nights of insomnia oh nights of Manhattan !
So agitated by flickering lights,
while motor-horns howl of empty hours
And while dark waters carry away hygienic loves, like
rivers flooded with the corpses of children.
Leopold Sedar Senghor
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