To Auguste Brunet
The city has closed its many colored eyes
And shushed its clowns, gongs and tam-tams;
On the calm water the captain of the port
Takes the oars of a sampan and glides…
Since the last cholera epidemic
When his daughter was brusquely swept away
– It is just a year ago today
Captain Kio-tsu has greatly changed.
After the event – and he such a worldly navigator!
He broke with all his relations
And lived in his sad, solitary cottage:
(For a time, there was even fear, for his sanity…)
His despair seems to detain him like a pillory
As he lowers his anemic head in rowing,
He circulates among the boats at anchor,
Cargo-boats, steamers, coal-burners…
How the calm of this beautiful night weighs on him!
Ah suddenly the wounded father
Curses this Japanese night,
As in its cloak Nagasaki sleeps…
An hallucination from his sick spirit
Makes him hear the sinister voices of sirens
From all the boats asleep there, in the swell,
Lamenting in concert the death of his Yu-len!
Yes, they cry for the young Departed
Like the mourners at ancient burials:
Their shrieks of bewitched Valkyries
A choir of strident and piercing clamor,
The sorrowful whistling of somber departures,
– Ah, what an anniversary for a sailor’s daughter!
– This is what is heard in the senseless woe without remedy
Of Nagasaki’s Port captain;
When nothing disturbs the moonstruck tepid night
But the slow bubbling of teriyaki…
(Henry Jean-Marie Levet)
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Based on Topics: Night Poems, Sadness Poems, Time Poems, Death & Dying Poems, Youth Poems, Fear Poems, Cities Poems, Daughters Poems, Sanity PoemsBased on Keywords: gongs, pillory, cholera, departures, moonstruck, auguste, hallucination, epidemic, burials, valkyries, circulates