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« Free of all fashion,
immune to all images,
that’s how the poor in spirit
live in this place”
Hadewijch d’Anvers (13th c),
God’s empty and savage simplicity
That evening, walking towards my father’s house,
through the last waves of a blazing dusk
in that summer of fire, I met you by chance, O my dear Friend,
you who were still miraculously handsome, still mild-mannered,
exquisitely kind, courteous and smiling!
You had finally returned from abroad, after many years,
my dear, my melodious child of this country!
Choking with emotion, I took you in my arms, and
started
to cry hot tears! O, my Friend,
your eyes were still as bright as when
we were happy youths together! For you, time
seemed to have stood still, time with end!
“I’m poor”, you said, “I’ve come home poor!”
But your soul was still shining out as if it were the first day
we’d met! Like Asclepius’s bees, from moment to moment
poetry had revived your life and its hidden side!
Words had been the exact, pure measure of your heart
and had brought forth your book which was as perfectly true to life
as the heat, as the path through our village,
as life itself! How well you knew how to hold onto
the boldness and freshness youth!
I saw from your eyes full of the dawn,
my Friend, that you hadn’t forgotten the virtues,
that you still believed in the spirit,
in the soul, in a precious invisible reality!
What use is a life if it doesn’t lead to God?
Faith is the gift fate makes to those
who have the truth deep within!
Ah, my Friend, you escaped the treacheries
that ripped apart our untamed country,
the dark quarrels between vultures,
the theft, devastation, murders,
the years like a black mass,
the scars, the wounds!
“Come”, I said to you that evening, “Come to my house,
my Friend, honour my threshold;
O my beloved Friend, under the weeping willow,
talk me like you used to about the Greek poets, the Muses,
the gods, the immortal heroes!
Fill my ravaged heart with your voice that
still vibrates with all that’s holy!
And if my ruined face,
the wrinkles that have made me ugly,
my worn-out body, my wife’s faded beauty
and my ill-behaved children annoy you,
go and look in the garden
where we spent unforgettable
moments! There where the birds know the universe
and freely let themselves be known by it”!
Than, suddenly, you turned your shining face
towards me, and, letting out a heartbreaking sigh, said:
“My Friend, are you the only one who still believes in
me and love me?
Don’t you know that I no longer exist?
To make my words live
I had to efface the self that lay behind every sound
and die in every word!
Thus my poetry became
like a jewel of sombre beauty
that you turn around and around
in a ray of inner light!
Translated from the French by Norton Hodges
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