Va barzhonegoù

MY POEMS

 

If I write by the light of my lamp

Disorderly and empty verses

Uncertainly with this small stub in my tired hand

If I write at night on the back of envelopes

Insignificant poems: poor merchandise

In which are found only wildflowers...

And a crumb of love,

All this I do for those I love.

 

Yet I do write, other poems

Not by the light of the lamp.

But by the rays of the Sun

Not on the back of envelopes

But on the bare breast of the One I love,

On the bare skin of the Country I love.

I don't write them with a pencil stub

But with steel tools...

---Don't think of a lance or sword,

My tools are tools of peace and of existence---

 

I don't write verses of twelve feet

In counting on my fingers,

But of twelve-by twenty paces ... and more.

My verses are written swath by swath

With the sharp steel of my scythe on the yellow hair of my country

The Sun turns them into fragrant poems

That my cows scatter for me during winter nights.

 

 My verses are written with the blade of my plow

On the living flesh of my Brittany, furrow after furrow

---In which I hide grains of gold---

Springtime turns them into poems

Emerald seas waving in the breeze.

Summer turns them into lovely lakes of shafts

The Harvest-Wind sets them to music

And the clanging of the thresher sings them to me

During the hot days of the eighth month

During days of pain and dust and sweat

My poems sacred and ...disdained!

 

March 1966.