The inventors

They came, the foresters from across the valley, whom we

did not know, refractory to our customs.

They came in numbers.

Their troop appeared between the cedars

And the fields of the old harvest now irrigated and green.

The long march winded them.

Their caps broke over their eyes and their wornout feet

alit in the waste.

They caught sight of us and halted.

Visibly they did not assume we’d be there,

On easy ground and closed furrows

Entirely uncaring for an audience.

We raised our heads and encouraged them.

The most fluent approached, then a second just as

uprooted and slow.

We came, they said, to warn you of the near arrival of the

hurricane, of your implacable adversary.

No more than you, we know it not

Otherwise than by relations and confidences of the

ancestors.

But why are we incomprehensibly happy before you and

suddenly like small children?

We told them thanks and dismissed them.

But they’d been drinking, and their hands shook, and their

eyes laughed around the edges.

Men of trees and of the axe, capable of outfacing whatever

terror but inept at conducting water, at aligning

buildings, at enduing them with pleasant colors,

They were unaware of the winter garden and the economy of

joy.

Of course, we could have convinced and conquered them,

For the anguish of the hurricane is moving.

Yes, the hurricane was going to come soon,

But was it worth the effort of discussing it and disrupting the

future?

From where we sit, there is no urgent fear.

Oh the ever leveler solitude

Of tears that reach the peaks.

When the rout is declared

And an old powerless eagle

Sees his assurance come back,

Happiness leaps in its turn,

On the flank of the abyss recaptures them.

Rival huntsman, you’ve learned nothing,

You who without haste overtake me

In death which I contradict.

René Char