Poor Pallid Child

Poor pallid child, why shout at the top of your voice in the street your sharp and insolent song, lost amongst the cats, lords of the roofs? for it won’t pass the shutters on the ground floors, behind which you know naught of heavy curtains of silk incarnadine.

Meanwhile you sing fatally, with the tenacious assurance of a little man who goes along alone through life, not counting on anybody, working for himself. Have you ever had a father? You don’t even have an old woman to make you forget hunger by beating you, when you come back home without a sou.

But you work for yourself: erect in the streets, covered in colorless clothing made like a man’s, a thinness premature and too tall for your age, you sing for food, with ferocity, not lowering your unpleasant eyes to the other children playing on the road.

And your complaint is so loud, so loud, that your bare head that is raised in the air just as your voice rises, seems to want to leave your little shoulders.

Little man, who knows if it won’t take off one day, when, after having shouted for a long time in the cities, you will have done a crime? a crime isn’t very difficult to do, go, it’s enough to have courage after the desire: and those who... Your little face is energetic.

Not one sou descends into the wicker basket that is held in your long hand hung without hope on your trousers: they will make you bad and one day you will commit a crime.

Your head lifts up always and wants to leave you, as if in advance it knew, while you sing with an air that becomes menacing.

It will tell you goodbye when you pay for me, for those who are worth less than me. You came probably to the world to this end, and you fast for now, we are going to see you in the newspapers.

Oh! poor little head!

Stéphane Mallarmé