Rains
Rain which in your most regrettable overflowings never forgets
the way the girls of Chiriqui suddenly pull out from between
their darkened breasts lamps made out of flickering
glow worms
Rain capable of absolutely anything except washing away the
bloodstains on the fingertips of assassins of entire peoples
startled beneath the tall treetops of innocence
—Aimé Césaire
translated from the French by Michael Benedict
quoted from
Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet
edited by Alice Oswald
COMMENTARY
“There is only one way out of the solipsism of the moment: the realization that consciousness is not a monad that exists in the form of a momentary image but rather in the form of human consciousness, i.e., consciousness based both on the body and on the external world. The only radical immanent phenomenon is the moment and its illumination; the insertion of the momentary image (in the dimension created by illumination) into the process of successive images requires the experience of processes transcending consciousness.” Anamnesis (CW Vol 6) 78f.
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