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Alone, in a corner of earth where sadness hovers
And the melancholy, vague weariness of evenings,
The old white house, with its great black shutters,
Does it weep for its people, its master, its mistress?
With its door closed and its windows in mourning
That seem, from afar, but a vaporous tracing,
The white and black house looks like a catafalque
Raised over the void and the night of a coffin.
On the crosses of gables stained with ochre and soot,
Like a faded crepe, the moss flies in the wind,
And one would say, at times, that from the eaves falls
A snow of ashes and tears of rain.
Three generations have toiled in this place:
Three generations of tillers of the soil
Have long lived the solitary dream,
Which begins at the altar and ends before God.
All seems dead… Suddenly, the glazing that glimmers
Opens, and, as in the morning, a poppy shines,
A ruddy face appears, and the echo
Scatters the humming of a child straining his voice.
Red with pride, the proud little farmer boy,
Whom the ancestral cradle has brooded in the straw,
With the play of a golden throat, dazzles the brood
And silences the blackbird and the crowing rooster.
And the old house, so many times saddened
By the death knell and the farewell of funeral processions,
Takes up youth and life at the sole sound of the voice
That conjures away the boredom haunting its soul.
Old age is no more. Here is the young time:
The dawn enters despite the morose window;
The room ceilings and furnishes itself with pink;
The house begins again to live its twenty years.
And the head of the work, outdoors in the prime of the year,
Blesses the clear horizon and the rising sun,
The cloud and the bird, the dew and the wind,
Which all promise him a beautiful day.
Charles-Nérée Beauchemin
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-lonely-house-charles-neree-beauchemin/