The Maple, Poem by Charles-Nérée Beauchemin

The maple with torso hard and strong,
Dulls the iron that assails it,
And, despite many and many a gash,
Resists the North’s greatest blows.

Winter, whose course drags on endlessly,
From frost and snow has woven
The shroud of the frozen tree.
The maple is dead! howls the north wind.

The maple is dead! cries to the sun
The proud oak that rears up.
The maple in silence prepares
The triumph of its awakening.

Beneath the rough velvet of the mosses
The old wound has healed,
And the sap of a bruised trunk
Bursts into glorious shoots.

From the depths of a rich soil,
The tree pushes up; it seems it would
Magnify, from leaf to leaf,
The miracle of a fertile heart.

It took but one warm hour
For suddenly there was seen to bloom,
Upon the buds, slow to open,
The purple, the gold and the emerald.

The maple lives! sings in its flight
The whole choir of forests in festival:
The maple, from root to crown,
Quivers at the song of the nightingale.

Against the north wind and the avalanche,
The majestic king of the woods
Has taken, and will take a hundred times,
Its victorious revenge.

The maple well symbolizes
The supernatural endurance
Of this hardy race of France
That grows in full Canadian soil:

Robust and fertile nurse
Whose flank, so many times wounded,
From the rough blows of a proud past
Bears the illustrious scar.

Charles-Nérée Beauchemin

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-the-maple-charles-neree-beauchemin/