Fragment #157

Les prés dévastés

gorgés de batailles

bleuissent au soleil.

La marée des nuages monte

cumulus de pétrole

obscurcissent le gravier laiteux.

Le berger n'a plus qu'à faire demi-tour,

lui qui n'a jamais su s'habituer

il écoute son propre cœur

comme pour la première et ultime fois

et s'en vient, triste,

fendant les cieux de sa houle.

Multisouled

"To know another language is to have a second soul."

Charlemagne, King of the Franks (742-814)

Fragment #2

Come the night,
moths banging on the ceiling light,
its heart beating in unison
its bosom
caving the crickets
and the only stars in the thickets
the fireflies

Extremisms

"It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind."

Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

From Ω to Α

"Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)

Fragment #3

Capable de tout he was,
even batting the Russians' head
with his defunct rifle,
but standing on his mudhill,
like an ant incapable of sensing its way back,
his boots heavy with the rasputitsa,
he feels lassitude.
He knows he's going to die –
the Russians aren't known for their shilly-shalliness –
half-buried under a foot of mud,
that which the wind cakes on his uniform,
far from wife and home.
Darn mud.

Nor their laziness...

"Don't judge men's wealth or godliness by their Sunday appearance."

Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)

Ode to the missing one

Where's the girl I'm supposed to date?
Vanished, by some trick of fate!
Don't tell me I was too late,
I was there on that date.
I'm quite au fait
on any fete
but that's another debate.
Perhaps she is in such a state
as she can't but circumnavigate
and she's stuck in Kuwait.
Well, I hate having to wait.
At any rate,
with all this overrate
let's hope she has a clean slate.
But let me get this straight:
I know that she's great
and my love for her didn't bate
but I'm yearning to relate
soon rather than late
and get to create
and sedate
in some real estate
in the Bering Strait.
There we'd ice-skate
and, elate,
we would mate
and ornate
the world with a new bunch of mouths to sate.
Come on, my promise, my soulmate,
I don't want to deflate!

åppås

Argentine snow yields lilies
on the levee of the marshes.
The dry season stupefied all,
the great billowy mass of virgas
crawled and blanketed all,
daggered the land
with shafts of sundust
and dwarfed the strongest burgas
we had seen in our days,
birthed the most radiant flowers.


Snowflakes the size of fists
pulverise the fields,
deposit frozen droplets
on the bending branches,
wisps of snow windcoil,
rage around the firs,
stilling the thoughts of movement
before they are even taken.


And such things the eye can't perceive
the photographs reveal
in a silver unguent of healing vision:
the dazzling drops of whiteness
silhouetted on a canvas of ice.


Stooped against the slanting current
the poet slogs on,
shards of rime boring through his brittle beard,
his breath drawing palpable vapour
in the still and fierce air.
His mind fixed on one purpose only:
a faint blue glint lost in the wilderness,
in the absolute necessity of snow,
a cerulean call to dive
into the unmistakable pallor of death,
a gaze which had pierced his very body,
calling for resolve and action.


The poet slogs on,
unperturbed, ready, percipient,
until he sees, in the squalls of snow,
the glaucous summon.
Now is the time.
The whiteout ceases,
and all around him for miles and miles
nothing can be discerned
but those spellbinding specks of blue.

Best viewed in the dark

That's what happens when you try to zoom in on a particular star

with a 15s exposure without a tripod...