TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY PATRICK WILLIAMSON

 

 

1

 

 

I love you, that’s all, day that falls

dawn that rises from night bound to morning,

nothing but this desire born of a memory

even greater than of the birther:

to be born; it’s a little bit more than love,

and a little less.

 

I love you, that’s all it is, a prayer,

a four-handed poem for a single voice,

nothing but two paths on the same track

this sky we share from the recesses of a ravine,

an excess of life, where death never prevails.

 

I love you, it’s nothing but this white gesture

in the silence yet to come. I love you

and it’s nothing but this coming to me, this departure

I know you’ll return from, I love you in the parting,

the playing, the go-away.

 

 

*

 

 

I love you beyond your body and mine,

I love you against evil forces, against the law,

I love you in wrinkles that form stars

in this absence where you carve your triumph,

I love you like a swarm on laden branches.

 

I love you; that’s all it is, a drop of sorrow

on an evening word, in morning solitude

when you weren’t there. I love you as a kind of faith,

a storm that grafted you to me.

I love you, that’s all, an image to spin out

in the transparency of years.

 

I love you, and a hundred thousand faces fall,

only one is mine.

 

 

 

 

 

x      x

It’d been eleven o’clock since morning;

the clock impressed time

on the living of a moment.

It was not to love,

but to sail in high heaven,

death face down,

fullness and emptiness one and the same.

We shouldn’t call happiness

what we used to call something else;

solemn faces to pose a spring,

crazy and at large like a ship.

on the high seas, we lived by slowness,

our plain was water and our time

not your time.

It was eleven o’clock on the rim of the world,

eleven definite white hours

that defied silence in the victorious launch

without violence where loving was said elsewhere,

where pleasing, losing and flesh

played out in the infinity of a vow, where the seconds

cited alive the fiercely soaked

mouths drowned in the infinitive of blue

 

 

 

You said she was close to death,

You said she was as strong as the sea,

and you said the sea belongs to no one.

You said her sails were dark.

“I sail alone”.

 

You said:

“let’s take time to another place,

you’ll plant your songs of the sun there; we’ll talk

under orange trees with blossom feverish with this blue,

even bluer than the blue

                                             of eternal uncertainty.

 

“I sail alone”.

 

You said:

“she’s a stranger to me, I sail alone”.

You said love is anchored to freedom,

and life has no port.

 

I saw on a dead sea

a haughty woman leading a sad ship to war.

 

 

The time will come to walk

away from hatred.

We will unbolt our steps,

readjust our footprints;

we will no longer look

in our mirrors, the plump

reflection of the gods,

but we will reinvent man

in his own thirst;

we will climb the strait morning

of the borderless,

and our only religion will be

our sons and the earth.

---

Also, read ‘A Sunny Memory’ by B Ajay Prasad, translated from Telugu by D V Subhashri and published in The Antonym.

A Sunny Memory — B Ajay Prasad

---

Follow The Antonym’s Facebook page  and Instagram account  for more content and exciting updates.