Shell-Colored Moon – There Is

Poem by Guillaume Apollinaire Collection CalligrammesThemes WarPeriod 20th century

There is a ship that carried away my beloved
There are in the sky six sausages and night falling makes them look like maggots from which stars would be born
There is an enemy submarine that was after my love
There are a thousand little firs broken by shell splinters around me
There is an infantryman passing blinded by asphyxiating gas
There is that we have chopped everything to pieces in the guts of Nietzsche of Goethe and of Cologne
There is that I am pining for a letter that is late
There are in my card case several photos of my love
There are the prisoners passing with anxious looks
There is a battery whose gunners bustle around the guns
There is the mail orderly arriving at a trot by the Lonely Tree road
There is they say a spy prowling around here invisible like the horizon with which he has shamefully clothed himself and with which he blends
There is raised like a lily the bust of my love
There is a captain waiting anxiously for the wireless communications over the Atlantic
There are at midnight soldiers sawing planks for coffins
There are women crying out loudly for corn before a bloody Christ in Mexico
There is the Gulf Stream that is so warm and so beneficent
There is a cemetery full of crosses 5 kilometers away
There are crosses everywhere here and there
There are prickly pears on those cactuses in Algeria
There are the long supple hands of my love
There is an inkwell I had made from a 15-centimeter shell and that they would not let go off
There is my saddle exposed to the rain
There are the rivers that do not flow back up their course
There is love that draws me on gently
There was a German prisoner carrying his machine gun on his back
There are men in the world who have never been to war
There are Hindus who gaze in astonishment at the Western countryside
They think with melancholy of those whom they wonder whether they will see again
For they pushed very far during this war the art of invisibility

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-shell-colored-moon-there-is-guillaume-apollinaire/