Laure Cambau

Apr 9, 2021 | Poetry | 0 comments

Translated from the French by Anne-Marie Glasheen

The Taste of Void

I took sleep from your pocket,
tattooed on your bone was a flower
red proffered
I put away your entrails
left drying with curls and shoes
by ear
I took the temperature of ecstasy
and on your blue lip
tested the taste of the void,
my breath suits you so well

Mothers leave fathers fade away
dismembered by the absent one
and children dream in a circle
of a mother clothed in light
fathers fade away
mothers leave
mothers carry little ones already old
old ones too little
and wild men
collected at the side of the road
that leads straight to the sun

There is simply an urgency
to leave the body,
by the chimney or the mouth,
the ears are for the spleen,
and the nostrils look out onto the void,
there is simply an urgency
to find the emergency wound

What will remain of me?
Some sand in your thoughts
a few fingers on your sex
and some small bones under your pillow

About Author

Laure Cambau

Laure Cambau lives in Paris. She is a poet and a pianist, as well as an author of stories for children and of song lyrics.
In her constant balance between the “fertility of sound” and “the magic reality of words” (D.H.Lawrence) she claims her right to strangeness. She has published nine collections of poetry and has been granted the Poncetton award by the Société des Gens de Lettres for Lettres au voyou céleste (Amandier, 2010). She also received Venus Koury-Ghata award in 2018. Her latest collection Grand Motel du Biotope was published in 2021 by Apic (Algiers).

About Translator

Anne-Marie Glasheen

Anne-Marie Glasheen, poet, photographer and translator, with an English mother and Belgian father, spent her early childhood in Belgium. A past Chair of the Translators Association, Glasheen has translated fiction, non-fiction, plays, poetry and art history books. Her translated plays have been performed at the Edinburgh and Brighton festivals, in London, the USA and Northern Ireland. In 1998, she was the recipient of the Belgian francophone prize for translation. Her poetry has been published in poetry journals in Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the UK and USA and her first collection appeared with Bradshaw Books in 2008.