Français
Español
Italiano
Deutsch
Português
How beautiful these rockets are that light up the night
They rise on their own summit and lean over to look
They are ladies dancing with their gazes for eyes arms and hearts
I recognized your smile and your vivacity
It is also the daily apotheosis of all my Berenices whose tresses have become comets
These gilded dancers belong to all times and all races
They give sudden birth to children who have only time to die
How beautiful all these rockets are
But it would be much more beautiful if there were even more of them
If there were millions of them that would have a complete and relative meaning like the letters of a book
Yet it is as beautiful as if life itself were coming out of the dying
But it would be more beautiful still if there were even more of them
However I watch them like a beauty that offers itself and vanishes at once
It seems to me I am attending a great feast lit a giorno
It is a banquet that the earth offers itself
It is hungry and opens long pale mouths
The earth is hungry and here is its cannibal Balthazar’s feast
Who would have said one could be to such a degree anthropophagous
And that so much fire were needed to roast the human body
That is why the air has a slight empyreumatic taste which upon my word is not unpleasant
But the feast would be more beautiful still if the sky ate with the earth
It swallows only souls
Which is a way of not feeding oneself
And is content to juggle with multicolored firesBut I have flowed into the sweetness of this war with all my company along the long long trenches
A few cries of flame ceaselessly announce my presence
I have dug the bed where I flow branching into a thousand little rivers that go everywhere
I am in the front-line trench and yet I am everywhere or rather I am beginning to be everywhere
It is I who begin this thing of the centuries to come
It will take longer to realize than not the fable of Icarus flying
I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire
Who was at the war and knew how to be everywhere
In the happy cities of the rear
In all the rest of the universe
In those who die trampling in the barbed wire
In women in cannons in horses
At the zenith at the nadir at the 4 cardinal points
And in the unique ardor of this vigil of arms
And it would doubtless be much more beautiful
If I could suppose that all these things in which I am everywhere
Could also occupy me
But in that sense nothing is done
For if I am everywhere at this hour there is however only I who am in me
Guillaume Apollinaire
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-shells-the-color-of-the-moon-marvel-of-the-war-guillaume-apollinaire/