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The sun that day spread out like a maternal
Womb that bled slowly across the sky
The light is my mother O bleeding light
The clouds flowed like a menstrual tide
At the crossroads where no flower but the rose
Of winds yet thornless has bloomed in winter
Merlin watched for life and the eternal cause
That makes the universe die and then be reborn
An old woman on a mule with a green cape
Came following the riverbank downstream
And ancient Merlin in the deserted plain
Struck his breast crying out Rival
O my frozen being whose fate overwhelms me
Whose fleshly sun shivers do you wish to see
My Memory come and love me my likeness
And what unhappy and beautiful son I wish to have
His gesture made the pride of cataclysms crumble
The sun dancing moved its navel
And suddenly the spring of love and heroism
Led by the hand a young April day
The roads that come from the west were covered
With bones of thick grasses of destinies and flowers
Trembling monuments near green carrion
When the winds brought hair and misfortunes
Leaving her mule to step slowly the lover came
With little gusts the wind smoothed out her attire
Then the pale lovers joining their mad hands
The interlace of their fingers was their only span of love
She danced miming a rhythm of existence
Crying For a hundred years I hoped for your call
The stars of your life influenced my dance
Morgan le Fay watched from high on Mount Gibel
Ah! how sweet it is to dance when for you declares
A mirage where all sings and the winds of horror
Feign to be the laughter of the hilarious moon
And to frighten the ghosts as forerunners
I have made white gestures among the solitudes
Lemures ran to people nightmares
My twirlings expressed the beatitudes
Which all are nothing but a pure effect of Art
I have never picked anything but the hawthorn flower
In ending springs that wanted to shed their blooms
When birds of prey proclaimed their plunder
Of stillborn lambs and child-gods who will die
And I have grown old you see during your life I dance
But I would have been soon weary and the hawthorn in bloom
This April would have had the poor confidence
Of a body of a dead old woman miming pain
And their hands rose like a flight of doves
Clarity on which night melted like a vulture
Then Merlin went away toward the east saying Let him rise
The son of my Memory equal of Love
Let him rise from the mire or be a shadow of a man
He will surely be my son my immortal work
His brow haloed with fire on the road to Rome
He will walk all alone looking at the sky
The lady who awaits me is named Viviane
And may the spring of new sorrows come
Lying among marjoram and coltsfoot
I shall eternize myself under the hawthorn in bloom
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-merlin-and-the-old-woman-guillaume-apollinaire/