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In the end you are weary of this ancient world
Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating
You are fed up with living in Greek and Roman antiquity
Here even the automobiles look ancient
Only religion has remained brand new religion
Has remained simple like the hangars of Port-Aviation
Alone in Europe you are not ancient O Christianity
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom the windows watch shame holds you back
From entering a church and confessing this morning
You read the prospectuses the catalogs the posters that sing aloud
That’s poetry this morning and for prose there are the newspapers
There are the serials at 25 centimes full of detective adventures
Portraits of great men and a thousand diverse titles
I saw this morning a pretty street whose name I’ve forgotten
New and clean it was the bugle of the sun
Managers workers and pretty stenographers
From Monday morning to Saturday evening four times a day pass through it
The siren moans there three times in the morning
An angry bell barks there toward noon
The inscriptions on signs and walls
The plaques the notices squawk like parrots
I love the grace of this industrial street
Located in Paris between rue Aumont-Thiéville and avenue des Ternes
There’s the young street and you are still only a little child
Your mother dresses you only in blue and white
You are very pious and with the oldest of your schoolmates René Dalize
You love nothing so much as the pomp of the Church
It’s nine o’clock the gas is turned down all blue you leave the dormitory in secret
You pray all night in the college chapel
While eternal and adorable amethyst depth
Turns forever the blazing glory of Christ
It is the beautiful lily that we all cultivate
It is the red-haired torch that the wind does not extinguish
It is the pale and ruddy son of the sorrowful mother
It is the tree always leafy with all prayers
It is the double gallows of honor and eternity
It is the six-branched star
It is God who dies on Friday and rises on Sunday
It is Christ who ascends to heaven better than aviators
He holds the world record for height
Pupil Christ of the eye
Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows how to do it
And changed into a bird this century like Jesus rises in the air
The devils in the abysses lift their heads to look at him
They say he imitates Simon Magus in Judea
They shout if he knows how to fly he should be called a thief
The angels flutter around the pretty acrobat
Icarus Enoch Elijah Apollonius of Tyana
Float around the first airplane
They sometimes move aside to let pass those transported by the Holy Eucharist
Those priests who rise eternally elevating the host
The plane finally lands without folding its wings
The sky then fills with millions of swallows
With rapid wingbeats come the crows the falcons the owls
From Africa arrive the ibises the flamingos the marabous
The Roc bird celebrated by storytellers and poets
Hovers holding in its talons the skull of Adam the first head
The eagle swoops down from the horizon uttering a great cry
And from America comes the little hummingbird
From China have come the pihis long and supple
Which have only one wing and fly in pairs
Then here is the dove immaculate spirit
Escorted by the lyrebird and the peacock with ocelli
The phoenix that pyre that engenders itself
For a moment veils everything with its burning ash
The sirens leaving the perilous straits
Arrive singing beautifully all three
And all eagle phoenix and pihis from China
Fraternize with the flying machine
Now you walk in Paris all alone among the crowd
Herds of bellowing buses roll near you
The anguish of love grips your throat
As if you were never to be loved again
If you lived in ancient times you would enter a monastery
You are ashamed when you catch yourself saying a prayer
You mock yourself and like the fire of Hell your laugh sparkles
The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your life
It is a painting hung in a dark museum
And sometimes you go to look at it closely
Today you walk in Paris the women are bloodstained
It was and I wish I did not remember it was at the decline of beauty
Surrounded by fervent flames Notre-Dame looked at me in Chartres
The blood of your Sacred Heart flooded me in Montmartre
I am sick from hearing the blessed words
The love I suffer from is a shameful disease
And the image that possesses you makes you survive in insomnia and anguish
It is always near you that image that passes
Now you are on the shore of the Mediterranean
Under the lemon trees that are in bloom all year
With your friends you stroll in a boat
One is from Nice there is a Menton man and two from Turbia
We watch with dread the octopuses of the depths
And among the algae swim fish images of the Savior
You are in the garden of an inn near Prague
You feel quite happy a rose is on the table
And instead of writing your prose tale you observe
The rose chafer that sleeps in the heart of the rose
Terrified you see yourself drawn in the agates of Saint Vitus
You were sad to death the day you saw yourself there
You resemble Lazarus crazed by the day
The hands of the clock of the Jewish quarter run backward
And you too retreat slowly in your life
Climbing to the Hradschin and in the evening listening
In taverns to Czech songs being sung
Here you are in Marseille amid the watermelons
Here you are in Koblenz at the Hôtel du Géant
Here you are in Rome seated under a Japanese medlar
Here you are in Amsterdam with a girl you find beautiful and who is ugly
She is to marry a student from Leiden
There rooms are rented in Latin Cubicula locanda
I remember I spent three days there and as many in Gouda
You are in Paris at the examining magistrate’s
Like a criminal you are placed under arrest
You have made painful and joyful journeys
Before noticing the lie and the age
You suffered from love at twenty and at thirty
I lived like a madman and I wasted my time
You no longer dare look at your hands and at every moment I want to sob
Over you over her whom I love over everything that terrified you
You look with eyes full of tears at these poor emigrants
They believe in God they pray the women nurse children
They fill with their odor the hall of the Gare Saint-Lazare
They have faith in their star like the magi
They hope to earn money in Argentina
And return to their country after making a fortune
A family carries a red eiderdown as you carry your heart
This eiderdown and our dreams are just as unreal
Some of these emigrants stay here and lodge
Rue des Rosiers or rue des Écouffes in slums
I have often seen them in the evening they take the air in the street
And move rarely like chess pieces
There are especially Jews their women wear wigs
They sit bloodless at the back of shops
You are standing before the zinc of a squalid bar
You take a two-sou coffee among the wretched
You are at night in a big restaurant
These women are not wicked they have worries nevertheless
All even the ugliest has made her lover suffer
She is the daughter of a policeman from Jersey
Her hands that I had not seen are hard and chapped
I have immense pity for the seams of her belly
I now humiliate to a poor girl with a horrible laugh my mouth
You are alone morning will come
The milkmen rattle their cans in the streets
The night withdraws like a beautiful Métive
It is Ferdine the false or Léa the attentive
And you drink this alcohol burning like your life
Your life that you drink like a brandy
You walk toward Auteuil you want to go home on foot
To sleep among your fetishes from Oceania and Guinea
They are Christs of another form and another belief
They are the inferior Christs of obscure hopes
Goodbye Goodbye
Sun slit throat
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-zone-guillaume-apollinaire/