Oh, the four walls of the cell!

Ah, the four whitening walls

Which never fail to add up to the same number!

Seedbeds of nerves, evil aperture.

How it snatches from its four corners

At the daily chained extremities!

Kind turnkey of innumerable keys,

If you were here, if you could see

Till what hour these walls remain four,

We should both be against them, we two,

More two than ever. And neither should you weep.

Speak, O liberator!

Ah, the walls of the cell!

Meanwhile I am hurt all the more

By the two long ones which, this night, possess

Something of mothers already dead,

Each leading a child by the hand

Down bromine steps.

And I am left alone,

The right hand upraised, which serves for both,

Seeking the third arm

Which, between my where and my when.

Must look for man’s powerless superiority.

LVI.

Every day I blindly get up at dawn

To work for my living; and I eat breakfast

Without tasting a morsel of it every morning.

Without knowing if I have achieved, or never,

Something that leaps out of the flavour,

Or is simply the heart, which having turned back, shall lament

Until the time when this is least of all.

A child would grow up surfeited with happiness

Oh dawns,

Faced with his parents’ regret at not being able to leave us,

To uproot themselves from their dreams of love for this world;

Faced with those who, like God, from so much love,

Understand each other even until they become creators

And love us even to doing us harm.

Fringes on an invisible pattern,

Teeth which ferret out from neuter emotion, pillars

Without base or capital,

In the great mouth which has lost the power of speech.

Match after match in the darkness,

Tear after tear in a cloud of dust.