LONG YEARS
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
“You can be free only with me, and I swear to you I will behave in the future. I am sorry for my part in the wrong. My mind is clear at last. I am fond of you. If you don’t want to come back, or don’t want me to join you, you are committing a crime, and you will repent of this for LONG YEARS to come, losing all freedom, and experience more atrocious suffering perhaps than you have felt. After this, think of what you were before knowing me!” ~ Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Verlaine very soon after he fled from the boy, abandoning him penniless in London. The translation is a conflation of translations by two authors, one of them Graham Robb.
A prophet and a poet you are not
Required to be to reach the truth of love,
That love that knives and genitals have fraught
With agonies of bliss, with thrust and shove,
Abandoned love like Judas sold for coins,
Devotion of men’s semen and their hearts,
Devotion caused by raging, kissing groins,
Devotion caused by passion’s soft gold parts,
Such loves as this will not evaporate
Like swords that sublimate in mushroom cloud
And heat, a geisha underneath a gate
Of red and yellow. Love like this blasts, loud.
..It echoes, tortured through long years. A bomb
….Might help to find a devastated calm.