Marie Dauguet: 'Pastel'

Pastel

 

Sable, cailloux, genêts, fenouil,

Voici la côte ardente et maigre,

Avec un vieil arbre en verrouil*

A travers le ciel d’un rouge aigre.

 

O mon âme, il fait dur et sec,

Un vent d'angoisse et de détresse

Siffle. Nul accord de rebec;

Les fleurs sont mortes de tristesse,

 

Car, sur l’horizon sans merci

Où du fiel jaunissant s’étale,

La côte au sol âpre et roussi

Que heurte une clarté brutale,

 

Se profile. Aucun bois obscur

Pour s’endormir nulle vallée;

Mais sur la côte, sec et dur,

Un soleil faux m’a violée.

 

Et des genêts es des fenouils

Il sort un vol de courbeaux maigres,

Tournoyant au ciel d’un rouge aigre

Autour d’un vieil arbre en verrouil.

 

* ‘en verrouil’ is an obsolete technical term for a girt sword held so that it points horizontally.

Although there is no English equivalent, luckily enough, knights jousting with lances are said to tilt.

And tilt has a double meaning, to lean out to one side.

 

Pastel

 

Sand and pebbles, fennel and broom,

Here is the coast, its gleam worn thin,

With an old tree that tilts for room*

Across skies red as rusty tin.

 

Oh, dear soul, all is hard and dry,

A wind of anguish and distress

That whines. No rebec chords drift by; 

The flowers have died from wretchedness.

 

Against the cruel horizon’s rim

Where yellowing bile spreads steadily,

The coast – whose soil is singed and grim,

Battered by brutal clarity –

 

Stands out. No dark wood can one spy

Where one can sleep, no vale or lea;

But on the coast both hard and dry

A false, rapacious sun took me.

 

And from the fennel and the broom

Some crows fly up, their bodies thin,

Gyrate in skies of rusty tin

Round an old tree that tilts for room.