When the world comes down to this one dark wood

Disdainful of labours,disdainful of famines!Dawn fills you witha [wound-searching,] cleansing love!A heavenly sweetnessbutters your stamens!Armand Silvestre

That, brow circled with copper, under the moon,An unknown Persian Genie would have worshipped;Impetuous with virginal sweetnesses,And dark, proud of his first obstinacies,Like tears of the summer night’s distresses,That turn on beds of diamond, young seas;The youth, faced with this world’s ugliness,Shudders in his heart, wounded deeply,And, full of profound eternal emptiness,Begins to long for…

Beneath the dribbling bushesYour raincoats lie;Pale white in private moonlight,Like round-eyed sores,Flap your scabby kneecaps apart,My ugly whores!We loved each other in those days,Ugly blue whore!We ate boiled eggsAnd weed.One night you made me a poet,Ugly blond whore.Get between my legs,I’ll whip you.I puked up your greasy hair,Ugly black whore;You tried to unstringMy guitar.Blah! Some…

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life,Pours burning love on the delighted earth,And when you lie down in the valley, you can smellHow the earth is nubile and very full-blooded;How its huge breast, heaved up by a soul,Is, like God, made of love, and, like woman, of flesh,And that it contains, big with sap…

(they do not exist). Recovered from the old fanfares of heroism,–which still attack the heart and head,– far from the old assassins.— Oh! the banner of raw meat against the silk of seas and arctic flowers;(they do not exist).– Bliss! Live embers raining in gusts of frost.–Bliss!– fires in the rain of the wind of…

Listen, trilling out their divine responses,To a black freak whose boots stink of cellars:But the sun wakes now, through the branches,The irregular stained-glass’s ancient colours.The stone always smells of its earthly mother.You’ll see masses of those earthy rocksIn the rutting country that solemnly quivers,And bears, on ochrous paths, near heavy crops,Those burnt shrubs where the…