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Jeanne-Marie has strong hands,
Dark hands tanned by the summer,
Pale hands like the hands of the dead.
— Are these the hands of Juana?
Have they taken the brown creams
From the pools of voluptuousness?
Have they been dipped in moons
In the ponds of serenity?
Have they drunk from barbarous skies,
Calm upon charming knees?
Have they rolled cigars
Or trafficked in diamonds?
On the burning feet of Madonnas
Have they withered flowers of gold?
It is the black blood of belladonnas
That in their palm bursts and sleeps.
Huntress hands of the flies
Whose bluish swarms hum
At dawn, toward the nectaries?
Hands that decant poisons?
Oh! what Dream has seized them
In their stretchings?
An unheard-of dream of Asias,
Of Khenghavars or of Zions?
— These hands have not sold oranges,
Nor tanned on the feet of gods:
These hands have not washed the swaddling clothes
Of heavy little eyeless children.
These are not a cousin’s hands
Nor the hands of workers with big brows
Whom, in woods stinking of factory,
A sun drunk on tar burns.
They are benders of spines,
Hands that never do harm,
More fatal than machines,
Stronger than a whole horse!
Stirring like furnaces,
And shaking all their shudders,
Their flesh sings Marseillaises
And never the Eleisons!
They would squeeze your necks, O women
Wicked, they would crush your hands,
Noble women, your infamous hands
Full of whites and of carmines.
The splendor of these amorous hands
Turns the heads of ewes!
In their savory phalanges
The great sun sets a ruby!
A stain of populace
Browns them like a breast of yesterday;
The back of these Hands is the place
That every proud Revolt kissed!
They have grown pale, marvelous,
In the great sun charged with love,
On the bronze of machine guns
Across insurgent Paris!
Ah! sometimes, O sacred Hands,
At your fists, Hands where tremble our
Lips never disintoxicated,
A chain with bright rings cries out!
And it is a strange jolt
In our beings, when, sometimes,
One wants to un-hands you, Hands of an angel,
By making your fingers bleed!
Arthur Rimbaud
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-jeanne-maries-hands-arthur-rimbaud/