Day 13: from 'Le Bleu et la poussière' by Jacques Izoard

Here is today's translation, from Le Bleu et la poussière ('The Bruise and the Dust') by Belgian poet Jacques Izoard (1936-2008). This is an extract from a longer poem. Not much time for commentary today, so feel free to provide your own, or just enjoy it as it is!

All will fall silent, all

will make of itself a misty quiet.

Chance, somewhere,

will don its dunce’s cap

for a final farewell.

For us who were the living

the flies will die.

After your proverbs and sayings,

your moons and your whims and your dreams,

your bare voice will emerge

like a rumbling sea

in the deepest of the deeps.

Life does not mean to say

that living is an absence.

But if life demands

armfuls of flowers –

also that flowers all die –

then leave you may.

What will be left to you

of your childhood tossed back and forth,

of your brawls, your negligible deaths,

of your self-forgetting,

is the bruise

we fashion poems from.