Contemporary Belgian Poetry / Selected and Translated by Jethro Bithell

by Unknown

VICTOR KINON.

1873—.

THE RESURRECTION OF DREAMS.
It is as warm as when the lilacs' scent
Is with the fragrance of magnolias blent,
When you can hear the seeds crack in the ground,
When first your face and hands are summer-browned
When every now and then in heavy drops
The rain begins, and all as sudden stops....
Slate and rust clouds voluptuously mass
Their bulk o'er the green corn and nibbled grass
Of fields that billow to yon purpled woods,
Which, through bronzed clouds, a sheaf of sunbeam floods.
Sweating, I climb the slope, where, like a long
White ribbon, runs the brook and sings his song.
A noisy cock pursues a clucking hen.
A sparrow flies with bits of hay. And then
Such is the silence you can hear from far,
Where the red roof-tiles of the village are,
The heavy, steady humming of the bees ...
(Can there be blossoms on the willow-trees?)
Here is the wood.—Pale with surprise you see
The ardent silence and the mystery
Whose sap swells in the branches which it studs
With downy catkins and with sticky buds.
Under the elm-trees' violaceous shade
The fresh anemones have snowed the glade;
The undergrowth bathes in a fawn half-light;
The pure air crackles with a lizard's flight;
And there, where on the hazel bough is poured
A ray of sunshine darted like a sword,
A trembling cloud of yellow pollen rises....
And now mysterious mirth my heart surprises
With words and cries of love and tenderness,
And an intoxicated glow and stress,
Because the spring with legendary dyes,
The white of snow and blue of Paradise,
And tender green of leaves all dewy sprent,
With nightingales, and honeysuckle's scent,
And chafers hanging heavily from blue
Lilacs, wet with rosy diamonds too,
With the clear crystal and mad pearls that gush
Out of the beak of quail and pairing thrush,
All the divine, forgotten spring reminds
My heart of ardours where the pathway winds!...
I love! My breast is full of flowers and birds!
I shall break out in ecstasy of words!
I love!—But whom?—I care not whom nor how!
I love, with all my blood in frenzy now,
And all the sighs that heave my breast, the maid
Who smiling comes beneath her cool sunshade....

MIDNIGHT.
The earth is black with trees of velvet under
A low sky laden with great clouds of thunder.
The gnomes of midnight haunt the dark, whose ears,
With luxury veiled, hear as a deaf man hears.
One is uneasy in one's stifling sheets,
And so uneasily the poor heart beats
That, bathed in sweat, at last you leave your bed,
And as in dream about the chamber tread.
You throw the window open. Not a sound.
Surely the wind is swooning on the ground,
And listening to some holy, mystic birth
Preparing in the entrails of the earth.
You listen, earnest, to your heart's loud shock
Beating with pained pulsations like a clock.
Then to the window-sill you pull a chair,
And watch the clouds weigh down the helpless air
Over the gardens whence, in sick perfumes,
Exudes the sweat of trees and wildered blooms.
HIDING FROM THE WORLD.
Shall not our love be like the violet, Sweet?
And open in the dewy, dustless air
Its dainty chalice with blue petals, where
The shade of bushes makes a shy retreat?
And we will frame our daily happiness
By joining hearts, lips, brows in rapt caress
Far from the world, its noises and conceit ...
Shall we not hide our modest love between
Trees wafting cool on flowers and grasses green?

THE GUST OF WIND.
I closed my window, lit my lamp, reclined
My temple on my hand, and sadly thought:
"Now let me read, and dream, and rest my mind ...
But, O my God, my heart is so distraught!
Yet, let me read." It was a traveller's book.
O sailing on broad rivers, on whose shore
Are baobabs and mangroves, while the song
Of curious birds wafts with the ship along,
Together with the tiger's grating roar....
A sudden gust of wind the window shook,
Followed afar off by continued whining.
I throw the window open wide, to look
Into the night, and see, with white teeth shining
In mocking grin, Death pass upon a steed
With yellow teeth, making its wet flanks bleed
With spurs of bone, and in the wind its mane
Tossing, together with his winding-sheet;
See Death, while all the trees moan out in pain,
Race under clouds lit by a livid sheet,
And brandishing above him his bright scythe!
Afar, Italian poplars curve their slim
And parallel trunks beneath the wind of him;
Dishevelled willows in the shadow writhe,
And the earth, looking at the monster, pants....
Now he is swallowed by the raucous squall.
Long I stand gazing at the rise and fall
Of foliage broken by a rending sob,
When suddenly the wind, with hollow throb,—
Lugubrious present from the Reaper!—heaves
Into the room a flight of withered leaves.
THE SETTING SUN.
The stainless snow and the blue,
Lit by a pure gold star,
Nearly meet; but a bar
Of fire separates the two.
A rime-frosted, black pinewood,
Raising, as waves roll foam,
Its lances toothed like a comb,
Dams the horizon's blood.
In the tomb of blue and white
Nothing stirs save a crow,
Unfolding solemnly slow
Its silky wing black as night.

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