Translated from the French
The House is Full of Roses
The house is full of roses and wasps.
One can hear, in the afternoon, the ring of vespers;
And transparent grapes the color of stones
Seem to sleep in the sun under slow shadows.
As I love you!
I give you my heart
That has twenty-four years, and my mocking mind,
My pride and my poetry of white roses;
And yet I don’t know you, you do not exist.
I only know that, if you were alive,
And if you were, like me, at the bottom of the meadow,
We would kiss, laughing with the blonde bees,
By the cool stream, beneath the deep leaves.
We’d understand the sun's heat.
You’d have the shadow of hazel on your ear.
Then we’d join our tongues, stop laughing,
Say what our love can never say;
And I’d find, on the red of your lips,
The taste of blond grapes, red roses and wasps.
The Water Flows (1894)
The water flows in mud and wood. The fields
Are soaked with rain.
The blackbirds live in damp alcoves
On the bellies of yellow saplings.
I drank from a fountain’s iron stem
In the froth and rust of the transparent sun.
I would have loved you once, there, amid the foam,
For you were fresh and young and beautiful.
But now I smile and smoke my pipe.
The dreams I had were those of magpies.
I think, reflect, read novels and verse
From Paris by men of talent.
Ah! They do not live with the springs
Which immerse the woodcocks in dead leaves.
When they see me come through the small wood doors
Of exhausted and abandoned houses,
I show them the thrushes, the farmers mild,
The woodcock in silver, the holly glowworms.
Then they smile and smoke on their pipes,
And, if they suffer still, for the people who are sad,
They will heal a little if they listen for
The cries of hawks advancing to some farm.
When Will I See the Islands? (1895)
When will I see my parents' islands?
One evening, between the ocean and the door
We smoked cigars in barbel blue suits.
A Negro guitar snored, and rainwater
Slept in the tubs of the court.
The ocean was like gossamer bouquets
And evening sad as summer and a flute.
We smoked black cigars and their red points
Seared the sky like birds in nests of moss
Speak to some very good poets.
O Father of my Father, you were there, before
My soul was born, and in the wind
Advice boats slid in the colonial night.
Did you think while smoking your cigar,
While a Negro played a sad guitar,
My soul was not already born there?
Was it the guitar or the wing of the boat?
Was it the bird moving its head
Hidden deep inside the plantations,
With the whir of heavy insects in the house?
