Translation by Connie Voisine and Patron K. Henekou.
This poem is also available to read in its original French version.
It’s May,
doorway to charming summer.
Summer, they say, is for lovers,
the doubled halves, or plurals, too
however, me, I don’t think of such a summer.
I refuse to believe in hibiscus love
on lawns in parks, of butterflies,
of grasshoppers and of naked buttocks.
My date is with the sun. It missed me,
my other half, completely round and warmer
than a blanket of kisses, even more
than brown thighs bared
which mustn’t be stared at under most circumstances.
I content myself with the clouds of the very blue sky,
sated with wine at the table of the sun, viscous, round.
I had been told that the sun never misses
a day in this month, all drunk whimsy.
I wait for it at my window which opens out onto Pentzer Park.
Because I must protect myself, I prescribe caution:
the sun in Lincoln is a chameleon. Yesterday. For instance,
it snowed. Light flakes fluttered, landing
like small butterflies to be immediately snapped up by the earth.
My neighbor maybe will step out today, for the third time since August.
Yesterday, this sexagenarian who can barely walk and never misses
a beer, her house was draped in a white cassock. In May.
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