Landscape with brook, by Paul Cézanne
He told himself they must be coming.
He said the words aloud and heard them fade away.
They must be coming, it was just
that they were moving so quietly.
If he might turn a single time
(if to look back were not the ruin
of this whole venture now near completion),
surely he would see those two
following him so noiselessly.
The little god of journeys and messages,
winged cap above observant eyes,
wings at the ankles too, slender staff held out before him,
and entrusted to his left hand: her.
The one so loved, that from a single lyre
more lament came forth than from centuries' sorrows.
So loved that a world took form from that lament
where everything came to be once more:
path and village, forest and valley, field, river, animal.
And round this lamenting world, as if
it were a second earth, moved a sun and star-strewn heavens,
a grieving heaven with grief-stricken stars.
That's how loved she was.
New Poems
Don't know if you've seen my meditative poems on these posts-- really enjoying them. I find the first stanza of this poem a bit awkwardly translated-- that abrupt colon and then "Her."-- wouldn't the sense and rhythm and inference be better, not to mention the grammar, if it read, "It was she."-- xxxj
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