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Milky Way O luminous sister
Of the white streams of Canaan
And the white bodies of lovers
Will we follow, panting, dead swimmers
Your course toward other nebulae
The demons of chance according
To the song of the firmament lead us
With their lost sounds their violins
Make our human race dance
On the descent backwards
Fates impenetrable fates
Kings shaken by madness
And these shivering stars
False women in your beds
In the deserts weighed down by history
Luitpold the old prince regent
Tutor of two mad royalties
Does he sob when thinking of it
When the fireflies flicker
Golden flies of Saint John’s Eve
Near a castle without a lady
The boat with singing barcaroles
On a white lake and under the breath
Of winds that tremble in springtime
Sailed swan dying siren
One day the king in the silver water
Drowned then with open mouth
He came back floating
On the bank to sleep inert
Face turned to the changing sky
June your sun burning lyre
Burns my aching fingers
Sad and melodious delirium
I wander through my beautiful Paris
Without having the heart to die there
Sundays become eternal there
And the barrel organs
Sob there in the gray courtyards
The flowers on the balconies of Paris
Lean like the Tower of Pisa
Evenings of Paris drunk on gin
Flamboyant with electricity
The streetcars green lights on their spines
Make music along the staffs
Of rails their machine madness
The cafés swollen with smoke
Cry out all the love of their gypsies
With all their sniffling siphons
With their waiters dressed in a loincloth
Toward you you whom I loved so much
I who know lays for queens
The laments of my years
Hymns of a slave to the morays
The romance of the unloved
And songs for the sirens
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-milky-way-o-luminous-sister-2-guillaume-apollinaire/