Sample Poems

Issue 5

Sample Poem

Names with asterisks link to bios.

Sanne

Poplars by the Lake

Leif Ericson

Nusch

Soup from Breadcrumb

Nusch
Au mal :

Nusch tu me manques c'est soudain
Comme si la forêt pouvait manquer à l'arbre

Je n'ai jamais écrit de poème sans toi
Je suis dans un bain froid
De solitude de misère
Et les mots ont le poids des loques sur les plaies
Et les images sont avares et butées
Et tout ce que je dis réfléchit une absence
Je reçois le présent comme un trésor la pioche
Mon plaisir maintenant c'est de tuer le temps

Se masquant de fumée le bois vert a brûlé
Les feuilles et les flammes n'étaient pas visibles
O toi ma grande étoile noire tu t'éloignes
Ton cercle n'est qu'un point celui de mon domaine

Toi ma vision changée en aveugle insensible
Supprime les reflets les échos du mensonge
Supprime mon remords de vivre
Annule les baisers que je reçois en vain.

Au bien :

Mon amour nous dormions ensemble
Et nous avons ri au matin
Ensemble tout le temps qu'il nous fallait pour vivre

Toute une éternité
Et plus je te voyais vivre à côté de moi
Plus je te confondais avec l'aube et l'été

Dormir profond rêver plus haut
Et s'éveiller l'un bien à l'autre
Telle est la loi de l'innocence

Et vivre plus haut que nos rêves
Être pareils par la confiance
Tel a été notre plaisir

Dans un monde toujours trop jeune d'un instant
Pouvions-nous donc prévoir l'hiver ou notre mort
Croire au fossile avant la fin du grand printemps

Raison nous étions deux à t'incarner légère
Comme une joue sous la rougeur du feu premier
Raison nous étions libres nous avons vaincu.

written 1949
*Paul Éluard

Paul Éluard was born in 1895 in Saint-Denis, outside Paris. At 18, he published his first book of poems, and after WWI he met André Breton, Philippe Soupault, and others involved in the Dada movement. Soon after, he became involved with the Surrealist movement, writing many extended works under its influence. After his marriage to his first wife ended, Éluard met Maria Benz, or "Nusch," whom he married in 1934. In 1946, Nusch died suddenly and tragically from a brain hemorrhage. Devastated, Éluard spent a year in depressed mourning. In 1949, he published A Moral Lesson. The poems in this volume further advance Éluard's conception of poetry as a revolutionary political and cultural force, with the preface to the work itself reading as a call to action: "Evil must be transformed into goodness. And by all the means we have left."

Nusch

On the side of evil:

Nusch I miss you it is sudden
As if the tree could miss the forest

I have never written a poem without you
I am in a cold bath
Of solitude and misery
Words have the weight of rags on wounds
The images sparing and stubborn
All of what I say reflects an absence
I receive the present like a treasure the pickaxe
My pleasure now is to kill time

Masking itself with smoke the young wood burned
The leaves and flames were not visible
O you my great black star you become distant
Your circle is only a point in my vicinity

You my vision changed into an insensitive and blind thing
Do away with reflections echoes of deceit
Do away with my remorse for life
Take back the kisses I receive in vain.

On the side of good:

My love we were sleeping together
And we laughed in the morning
Together all the time we needed to live

An entire eternity
And the more I saw you living by my side
The more I mistook you for the dawn and the summer

Sleeping deeply dreaming higher
Awakening one for the other
Such is the law of innocence

And to live higher than our dreams
To be identical through trust
That was our pleasure

In a world always an instant too young
Could we foresee winter or our death
Considering ourselves fossils before the end of the long spring

Reason we were both embodying you gentle
Like a cheek under the blush of the first fire
Reason we were free we triumphed.

Translated from French by
*Lisa Lubasch

Lisa Lubasch's most recent book of poems, Twenty-One After Days, was published by Avec in 2006. Her previous books are To Tell the Lamp, Vicinities, and How Many More of Them Are You? Green Integer will publish her translation of Paul Éluard's A Moral Lesson in 2006.