Contemporary Belgian Poetry Part 29

II.

On evenings when through eddying skies the wind Is whirling the swarming snow across the fields, Grey-headed farmers sit in reckonings lost, Near lamps from which a thread of smoke ascends.

The kitchen is unkempt and slatternly: A string of dirty children by the stove Gorge the spilt remnants of the evening meal; Mangy and bony cats lick dishes clean; c.o.c.ks make their beaks ring upon pewter plates; Damp soaks the leprous walls; and on the hearth Four flickering logs are twisting meagre shanks Dying with listless tongues of pale red ray; The old men's heads are full of bitter thoughts.

"For all the seasons unremitting toil, With all hands at the plough a hundred years, The farm has pa.s.sed from father on to son, And, with good years and bad, remains the same, Jogging along upon the brink of ruin."

This is what gnaws and bites them with slow tooth.

So like an ulcer hate is in their hearts, Patient and cunning hate with smiling face.

Their frank and loud good nature hatches rage; Wickedness glimmers in their icy looks; They stink of the rancorous gall that, age by age, Their sufferings have collected in their souls.

Keen are they on the slightest gain, and mean; Since they can not enrich themselves by work, Stinginess makes their hearts hard, their hearts fetid; And black their mind is, set on petty things, And stupid and confounded before great; As they had never raised their eyes unto The sun, and seen magnificent sunsets Spread on the evening, like a crimson lake.

III.

But kermesse is for them a festival, Even for the dirtiest, the stingiest, There go the lads to keep the wenches warm.

A huge meal, greased with bacon and hot sauces, Makes their throats salty and enflames their thirst.

They roll in the inns, with rounded guts, and hearts Aflame, and break the jaws and necks of those Come from the neighbouring town, who try, by G.o.d!

To lick the village girls too greedily, And gorge a plate of beef that is not theirs.

Savings are squandered--for the girls must dance, And every chap must treat his mate, until The bottles strew the floor in ugly heaps.

The proudest of their strength drain huge beer-mugs, Their faces fire-plated, darting fright, Horrid with bloodshot eyes and clammy mouth, In the dark rumbling revels kindle suns.

The orgy grows. A stinking urine foams In a white froth along the causey c.h.i.n.ks.

Like slaughtered beasts are reeling topers floored.

Some are with short steps steadying their gait; While others solo bawl a song's refrain, Hindered by hiccoughing and vomiting.

In brawling groups they ramble through the town, Calling the wenches, catching hold of them, Hugging them, shoving at them, Letting them go, and pulling them back in rut, Throwing them down with flying skirts and legs.

In the taverns--where the smoke curls like grey fog And climbs to the ceiling, where the gluing sweat Of heated, unwashed bodies, and their smells Dull window-panes and pewter-pots with steam-- To see battalions of couples crowd In growing numbers round the painted tables, It looks as if their crush would smash the walls.

More furiously still they go on swilling, Stamping and bl.u.s.tering and raging through The cries of the heavy piston and shrill flute.

Yokels in blue smocks, old hags in white bonnets, And livid urchins smoking pipes picked up, All of them jostle, jump, and grunt like pigs.

And sometimes sudden wedges of new-comers Crush in a corner the quadrille that looks, So unrestrained it is, like a mixed fight.

Then try they who can bawl the loudest, who Can push the tidal wave back to the wall, Though with a knife's thrust he should stab his man.

But the band now redoubles its loud din, Covers the quarrelling voices of the lads, And mingles all in leaping lunacy.

They calm down, joke, touch gla.s.ses, drunk as lords.

The women in their turn get hot and drunk, l.u.s.t's carnal acid in their blood corrodes, And in these billowing bodies, surging backs, Freed instinct grows to such a heat of rut, That to see lads and la.s.ses wriggling and writhing, With jostling bodies, screams, and blows of fists, Crushing embraces, biting kisses, to see them Rolling dead drunk into the corners, wallowing Upon the floor, knocking themselves against The panels, sweating, and frothing at the lips, Their two hands, their ten fingers ransacking And emptying torn corsages, it seems-- l.u.s.t is being lit at the black fire of rape.

Before the sun burns with red flames, before The white mists fall in swaths, the reeking inns Turn the unsteady revellers out of doors.

The kermesse in exhaustion ends, the crowd Wend their way homewards to their sleeping farms, Screaming their oaths of parting as they go.

The aged farmers too, with hanging arms, Their faces daubed with dregs of wine and beer, Stagger with zigzag feet towards their farms Islanded in the billowing seas of wheat.

FOGS.

You melancholy fogs of winter roll Your pestilential sorrow o'er my soul, And swathe my heart with your long winding-sheet, And drench the livid leaves beneath my feet, While far away upon the heaven's bounds, Under the sleeping plain's wet wadding, sounds A tired, lamenting angelus that dies With faint, frail echoes in the empty skies, So lonely, poor, and timid that a rook, Hid in a hollow archstone's dripping nook, Hearing it sob, awakens and replies, Sickening the woeful hush with ghastly cries, Then suddenly grows silent, in the dread That in the belfry tower the bell is dead.

ON THE COAST.

A bl.u.s.tering wind the scattered vapour crowds And shakes the horizon, where the dawn bursts, by A charge that fills the ashen azure sky With rearing, galloping, mad, milky clouds.

The whole, clear day, day without mist or rain, With leaping manes, gilt flanks, and fiery croups, In a flight of pallid silver and foam, their troops Career across the ether's azure plain.

And still their ardour grows, until the eve's Black gesture cuts the vast of s.p.a.ce, and heaves Their ma.s.ses towards the squall that landward blares,

While the ample sun of June, fallen from Heaven's vault, Writhes, bleeding, in their vehement a.s.sault, Like a red stallion in a rut of mares.

HOMAGE.

I.

To heap in them your heavinesses fair, By double, frugal, savoury b.r.e.a.s.t.s embossed, The rosy skin by which your arms are glossed, Your belly's curly fleece of reddish hair,

My verses I will weave as, at their doors Seated, old basket-makers curb and twine White and brown osiers in a clear design, Copying enamelled tesselated floors,

Until your body's gold within them teems; And like a garland I will wear them, spun In ma.s.sive blonde heaps on my head, in the sun, Haughtily proud, as a strong man beseems.

II.

Your rich flesh minds me of the centauresses, Whose arms Paul Rubens rounded in his dyes Of fire beneath a weight of sun-washed tresses, Pointing their b.r.e.a.s.t.s to lion-cubs' green eyes.

Your blood was theirs, when in the mazy gloaming, Under some star that bit the brazen sky, They heard a stranger in the sea-fog roaming, And hailed some Hercules astray and shy;

And when with quivering senses hot for kisses, And belly for the unknown gaping, their Arms they were twisting, calling to mad blisses Huge, swarthy eaters of rut on a body bare.

CANTICLES.

I.

Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires Of gold, with great wide eyes and bronze-nailed feet, Crawl towards your body my long, green desires.

In the full torrid noon of summer heat I have bedded you in a nook at a field's edge, Where the tanned meslin shoots a shivering wedge.

Heat is suspended o'er us like a das; The sky prolongs the vast expanse, gold-plated; Afar the Scheldt a dwindling, silver way is;

Lascivious, huge, you lie there yet unsated; Like lissom lizards drinking the sun's fires Of gold, crawl back to you my spent desires.

II.

My love shall be the gorgeous sun that robes With torrid summer and with idlenesses Your body's naked slopes and hilly globes,