Paul Éluard

Book of Flesh

I am a man in a vacuum

Deaf, blind, dumb

Perched on an immense pedestal of black silence

Nothing this limitless oblivion

This absolute of zeroes without end

A completed solitude

The day is without stain and the night is pure

Sometimes I take your sandals

And I walk toward you

Sometimes I wear your dress

And I have your breasts and your belly

Then I see myself beneath your mask

And I recognize myself

A Single Smile

A single smile fought

the stars as the night deepened

A single smile for us two

And the azure of your smiling eyes

Against the night’s mass

Found its flame in my eyes

I saw because I had to know

As night created day

That we did not change shape.

Between Moon and Sun

I said it was graceful and luminous

Your nakedness licks my child’s eyes

The happy hunters are ecstatic

To have raised a transparent prey

That dilates in a vase without water

Like a seed in the shadow of a stone

I see you naked knotted arabesque

A soft hand as the clock strikes

The sun spreads out along the day

Plaited rays my pleasures mat

The Power of Hope

I may as well avow my fate:

Nothing of my own. I’ve been dispossessed

And the roads that lead to my death

I travel, a bent slave

My pain alone is mine

Tears, sweat, and hard hard work.

I am an object of pity

An object of shame in the strong world’s eyes.

My food and drink is envy

Like another enough to drive me mad

Burning nostalgia for sleep:

In the heat, without end, like a beast.

I sleep too little, never go out

Don’t fuck around much

Yet my heart, empty, goes on

Does not deviate from pain.

I could have laughed, drunk with my caprice.

Dawn could make its nest in me

And shine, subtle and protective,

On those like me, now in bloom.

Do not pity me, since it’s you

Who are rigid and without justice:

A day will come when I’ll be among

The boulders of a living edifice,

The immense crowd where man is friend.