Victory
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A rooster’s crowing I’m dreaming and the downed
branches shake Their leaves which resemble sorry sailors Winged and spinning like Icarus the faux The blind men gesticulating like ants Looked at themselves in the rain in the gutter’s mirror Their laughter in a heap of grape-clusters Go not from me again speaking diamond Sleep easeful my home’s yours and all in it My bed my lamp my helmet shot through Look there precious sapphires cut in the vicinity of
Saint Claude The days were one pure emerald I remember you town of meteors They flowered in the air those nights all sleepless Gardens made of light I picked bouquets in You had enough of them for sure to scare that sky Out of its hiccoughs One imagines only with difficulty The point at which success makes people stupid and easygoing At the blind youth institute they wanted the truth Have you there no winged blind youth O mouths man is seeking out a new language The grammarian of no tongue will have aught to say
about And these old tongues are so near dying out That really it’s from habit and lack of daring That one still makes them serve for poetry But they are like patients with no will I daresay people will soon get used to silence Mimicry’s enough for cinema But still let’s go on
speaking Move our tongue Launch some splutter that
confounds They want new sounds new sounds new sounds They want consonants with no vowels Consonants that dully fart Go sound like a top Let a nasal sound crackle and so forth Cluck your tongue Help yourself to the dull noise of him who eats without manners The aspirate scrape of spitting would make a fine consonant too The various labial farts also would render your
speeches reverberant Learn how to burp at will And what letter low as a sounding bell Across our recollections We don’t love that joy enough Of seeing things fine and new O my sweet hurry up Be afraid some day a train might move you More Look at it faster for you turn These running railroads Will very soon leave this life They will be handsome and ridiculous Two lamps before me burn Like some laughing wife and wife I bow my head in sadness Before the ardent mocking strife And that laughter spreads out Everywhere Talk with your hands snap your fingers Tap your cheeks like a drum O words They follow in the myrtle grove Eros and Anteros weeping I am the city’s sky Hearken to the sea The sea groans afar and utters its cries in solitude My voice loyal as a shadow is Would at last be life’s
shadow Would be o sea alive disloyal as you The sea which has betrayed seamen numberless Engulfs my loud cries like gods that sink And sunlit the sea bears the shadow naught else The shadow of birds with outstretched wings The word is sudden is a God who shivers Advance and sustain me those hands I miss Of they who extended them and adored me together Tomorrow what an oasis of arms will receive me from
this Know you that joy of seeing new things O voice I speak the language of the sea And in the port the night of last taverns I who am more headed than the hydra of Lerne The street my swimming hands furrow Foraging the town with fingers subtle Goes off but who knows tomorrow The street becoming immobile Who knows what road I’ll follow Think that the railroads Will be outmoded and abandoned in a little while Regard Victory above all will be To see well into the distance To see everything Up close And that everything has a new name |
Guillaume Apollinaire