clover blossom

Please note: I will be away from the computer for about a week -- there are places in the world where that is still possible! -- but I will look forward to catching up on blog visits when I come home....

when shall i be as the swallow and give up my silence?

Lettre du vingt-six juin

Que les oiseaux vous parlent désormais de notre vie.
Un homme en ferait trop d'histoires
et vous ne verriez plus à travers ses paroles
qu'une chambre de voyageur, une fenêtre
où la buée des larmes voile un bois brisé de pluie...

La nuit se fait. Vous entendez les voix sous les tilleuls:
la voix humaine brille comme au-dessus de la terre
Antarès qui est tantôt rouge et tantôt vert.

*

N'écoutez plus le bruit de nos soucis,
ne pensez plus à ce qui nous arrive,
oubliez même notre nom. Ecoutez-nous parler
avec la voix du jour, et laissez seulement
briller le jour. Quand nous serons défaits de toute crainte,
quand la mort ne sera pour nous que transparence,
quand elle sera claire comme l'air des nuits d'été
et quand nous volerons portés par la légèreté
à travers tous ces illusoires murs que le vent pousse,
vous n'entendrez plus que le bruit de la rivière
qui coule derrière la forêt; et vous ne verrez plus
qu'étinceler des yeux de nuit...

*

Lorsque nous parlerons avec la voix du rossignol….


Philippe Jaccottet



Letter of 26 June

From now on let our life be told to you by birds.
A man would churn out too many tales
and all you’d see through his words would be
a traveler’s lodgings, a window
where tears have misted a rain-shattered wood….

Night settles. You hear voices under the lime trees:
the human voice shines like the earthward gleam
of Antares which is sometimes red, sometimes green.

*

Don’t listen anymore to the din of our worries,
don’t think about what has happened to us,
forget our name, too. Listen as we speak
through the voice of day, and let there be only
daylight shining. When we come to be drained of all fear,
when death seems to us mere transparency,
when it is clear as the night air in summer
and we are carried by lightness, flying
through all these imagined walls the wind leans on,
all you will hear is the sound of the river
flowing behind the forest, all you will see
is night’s eyes as they gleam….

*

When we shall speak with the voice of the nightingale….


Translated by Jennie Feldman

summer

no other world

We both had fears -- what might happen, what might not happen -- but in the end we forgot to be afraid. What was the point in dwelling on our fears? As if we might feel something different because we had been warned? We didn't know who we were together until we were together, until the secret that had been born within us stepped into the air and began to speak. And the the sky bowed to hear....

--Kitsune-onna

the dragonfly lives its life without a single error

It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful

but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,

frenzied,
wringing our hands,

half-mad, saying over and over:

what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?

The child asks this,
and the determined, laboring adult asks this—

both the carpenter and the scholar ask this,
and the fisherman and the teacher;

both the rich and the poor ask this
(maybe the poor more than the rich)

and the old and the very old, not yet having figured it out,
ask this
desperately

standing beside the golden-coated field rock,
or the tumbling water,
or under the stars—

what does it mean?
what does it mean?


--Mary Oliver
from "Gravel"