Status Updates From Selected Poems | Philippe J...

‘Love, like fire, can only reveal its brightness
on the failure and the beauty of burnt wood.’

“The one favour we can ask of the distant gods, / the dumb, blind renegades, / deserters, / might it not be that every tear / on a familiar face / sow the invisible earth / with inexhaustible wheat?”

Just realized this version on goodreads has no pages and so will technically be my shortest book — I swear there were 157 pages, and I even tried to read the French, god help me

“Wrap yourself in a cape of sunlight, / step like a hunter into the wind, / quicken your life like spring water. / Were you less afraid, / you would cast no shadow before you.”

This was the first time I’d ever seen the word “shroud-chaser” but something about it…

“Might he have need of our voices, our tears? / I don’t know; but one day or another will see / these stones buried by the eternal grass, / sooner or later there will be no one left / to visit the grave, which will be buried too, / not even shadows in that shadowless place.”

Translators are miracle workers.

“Dead leaves will make the living crown.”

“But already our smell is the smell / of something rotten at dawn; already / bone pierces the living skin / while stars fade at the end of the street.”

Love trying to translate the French version on the left, look over to the right and find I didn’t get it right even a little

Read five pages of the intro but this is 80s French poetry drama, I have no idea who they’re talking about, and I just don’t have it in me right now