Poetry

1. To all the women that you love
For a while - they don't know thereof -
This ditty is a tribute paid;
To passers-by you hardly know
Whom the whims of destiny draw
Along streams you shall never wade.

2. To the girl at the window pane
Who peeps and disappears again,
A lovable but fleeting sight
Of a graceful and slim body
Outlined surreptitiously
That makes you feel gay and look bright.

3. To the fair fellow traveller
Whose bright eyes, a charming picture,
Will make time go by and clock stand
You did understand her, maybe,
And yet you let her go freely
And did not even touch her hand.

4. To the woman in wedding bonds
With one who by no way responds
To her hopes and expectation;
And she gave, a useless nonsense,
To her despair shy utterance
And hinted at her frustration.

5. Ye, endearing glimpses caught,
Short-lived hopes with forgetting fraught,
You shall not survive tomorrow!
If only happiness occurs,
It wipes out or at least it blurs
The transient spells of sorrow.

6. But if you have wasted your life
You think, at the end of the strife,
Of happiness that grows and dies;
Of the kisses you durst not claim,
Of the hearts somewhere still aflame,
Of the never forgotten eyes.

7. And in evenings of weariness
You fill up your lonely recess
With phantoms from your memories,
And you bemoan the absent lips
Of those passers-by on their trips
You failed to stop. These fair fairies!


(Translated from the French poem by Antoine Pol)