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To Paul Vérola.
When the white stork, across the blue sky,
Striking with broad sweeps of air from her powerful wing,
Neck outstretched, her pink feet hanging beneath her,
Flies toward the climates of gold, of azure and of fire,
Carried away by her dream, and drinking from the ether
The intoxication of lightning flashes, she scarcely perceives
The long unrolling of the ceaseless plain,
Of rivers, of forests, of valleys, of the sea;
The fields and the hillsides, emerging from the horizon,
Vanish suddenly in a tiny flight;
And the great cities, as at the bottom of an abyss,
Exist but a moment and recede in a single bound;
A single day makes her cross the bounds of a country;
In the winds that she cleaves or else outruns,
Tirelessly her strong desire launches her
Toward the skies with suns forever in bloom.
But suddenly her prodigious gaze has seen,
In the cleft of a rock, beneath a fern frond,
The furtive gliding of a viper crawl;
Her inflexible flight in one stroke has swooped down.
When her fall stops and rises again in soaring,
She carries off, into the shivering air, the reptile,
And, in her beak the color of dawn, mutilates it,
While in black coils it knots and writhes.
Then, still dreaming of the dazzling suns,
Of the long halts at the edge of sacred waters,
Or on the minarets with gilded domes
Where the luminous evening streams in vermilion floods,
Joyful, she resumes, at the calm height
From which the endless lands become distant again,
Her splendid flight, whose black border of pinions
Isolates in the azure her dazzling whiteness.
Auguste Angellier
Translation generated by Poésies 123 with assistance from the deepseek-chat artificial-intelligence model.
Text published on Poésies 123: https://www.poesies123.com/en/poem-the-stork-auguste-angellier/