Rendezvous, Poem by Charles Cros

My fair love is dead,
And look, they carry her
To the ground, this morning,
In satin shoes.

She sleeps all white,
In her Sunday dress,
In her open coffin
Despite the winter wind.

Dig, gravedigger, dig
For my beautiful sweetheart
A very deep tomb,
With my place at the bottom.

Before night falls
Don’t close the tomb;
For she had told me
To come tonight,

To come to her room:
“On these December nights,
Alone, in my narrow bed,
Without you, I’m always cold.”

But, at a gray dawn,
Her brother surprised her
Naked and on my knees.
He told me: “Let’s fight.

Let me kill you. Then
I’ll kill the little one.”
It’s I who, guarding myself,
Killed him, however.

Her grief was so strong
That yesterday she died of it.
But, as she told me,
She waits for me in bed.

*
In the bed you know how to make,
Gravedigger, in the earth.
And, in this narrow bed,
Alone, she would be too cold.

I will go lie near her,
Like a faithful lover,
Throughout the whole night
That never ends.

Charles Cros

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-rendezvous-charles-cros/