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Brother Jacques, Brother Jacques,
Awake from your winter sleep,
The slender copses are already green
And here we are in Easter time,
Brother Jacques.
At the edge of the bleak and pallid wood
Where your tall body fell asleep
Since autumn,
The blind and flickering fog,
On the highways of chance,
Has wandered, long, through the monotonous fields;
And the oaks with black branches
Twisted by fierce wind
Have let fall,
From evening to evening,
Their dead golden foliage on the edges of your bed.
Brother Jacques,
It has snowed for months
And on your hands, and on your fingers
Full of chaps;
It has snowed, it has frosted,
On your pale and tonsured head
And in the faded folds
Of your rough robe.
The torpid season has entered into you
With its mourning and its dread,
And its sly north wind and its willful frost;
And such is the heaviness of your old weary brow
And the stillness of your two crossed arms,
That they might be those of a dead man resting underground.
Brother Jacques,
Yesterday morning, despite the cold,
Two daffodils, three anemones
Lifted their pink or yellow petals
Toward you,
And the white-headed titmouse,
Fragile and nimble, hopped
On the dogwood branch
That toward your wide bed of wet leaves
Leans.
And you sleep, and you sleep still,
At the edge of the deep and muffled wood,
Though the bees come
To buzz until evening at your closed ears
And though one sees in swirls
Hovering over your stiff beard
A bright and swift pair
Of butterflies.
Yet, behold, through your slumber
You have caught, from dawn, going away
The motley procession
Of the hundred bells that go to Rome;
And, their bell towers remaining
Silent and hesitant
During these three long days of anguish and absence,
You awaken listening
To the reign from one end of the fields to the other
Of silence.
And shaking then
From your heavy cloak that brambles festoon
The icicles of winter and the mists of autumn,
Brother Jacques, you ring
With an arm so rough and strong
That everything hurries in the meadows and grows feverish on the hills
At the clear call of your matins.
And from the edge of an orchard the cuckoo answers you;
And the insect gleams from thicket to thicket;
And the sap beneath the earth immensely quivers;
And the golden leafage spreads and causes
Its shadow to bow to the old walls of cottages;
And work surges up countless and powerful;
And the wind seems made of moving light
To brush the bud of a hollyhock
And the bristling brow of a pale nascent ear of grain.
Brother Jacques, Brother Jacques,
How all life has confidence in you;
And like the bird sings at the top of my roof;
Brother Jacques, Brother Jacques,
Rough and valiant bell-ringer of Easter.
Emile Verhaeren
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-at-easter-emile-verhaeren/