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To Toussaint-Luca
The children of the dead go play
In the cemetery
Martin Gertrude Hans and Henri
No rooster crowed today
Kikiriki
The old women
All in tears walk along
And the good donkeys
Bray hee-haw and start to graze on the flowers
Of the funeral wreaths
It is the day of the dead and of all their souls
The children and the old women
Light candles and tapers
On each Catholic grave
The old women’s veils
The clouds of the sky
Are like goats’ beards
The air trembles with flames and with prayers
The cemetery is a beautiful garden
Full of gray willows and rosemary
Friends you bury often come to you
ah! how well off you are in the beautiful cemetery
You beggars dead drunk on beer
You the blind as destiny
And you little children dead in prayer
Ah! how well off you are in the beautiful cemetery
You burgomasters you boatmen
And you councilors of the regency
You too gypsies without papers
Life rots you in the belly
The cross grows between your feet
The Rhine wind hoots with all the owls
It extinguishes the candles that the children always relight
And the dead leaves
Come to cover the dead
Dead children sometimes speak with their mother
And the dead women sometimes would like to return
Oh! I do not want you to go out
Autumn is full of severed hands
No no they are dead leaves
They are the hands of the dear dead women
They are your severed hands
We have wept so much today
With these dead their children and the old women
Under the sunless sky
In the cemetery full of flames
Then in the wind we turned back
At our feet rolled chestnuts
Whose burrs were
Like the wounded heart of the madonna
Of whom one doubts whether she had skin
The color of autumn chestnuts
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-autumn-rhenish-guillaume-apollinaire/