Here I am first of all a man full of sense

Knowing life and of death what one living can know

Having proved the joys and the sorrows of love

Having sometimes known how to impose his ideas

Knowing several tongues

Being pretty well traveled

Having looked at the war from the infantry and the artillery

Shot in the head trepanned under ether

Having lost his best friends in the frightful fight

I know as much of the old and the new as one man alone could learn

And today without getting upset at this war

Just between ourselves for ourselves my friends

I judge that long wrangle to be of tradition and change

Of Adventure and Order

You whose mouth is made in the image of God’s

Mouth that’s the order itself

Be indulgent when you compare

To those who have been the perfection of order

Us who everywhere seek for adventure

We aren’t your enemies

We want to give you dominions vast and strange

Where the flowers’ enigma yields to whoever will pick it

There there are brand-new fires and colors unseen

A thousand phantasms imponderable

That have to be given reality

We want to explore the enormous bounteous country where all is unspoken

There’s a time to go forth as well as a time to return

What pity for us who fight all the time on frontiers

Of limitlessness and the future

What pity our errors what pity our sins

Here comes the summer the violent season

And my youth is as dead as the spring

O Sun it’s the time of passionate Reason

And I’m waiting

To follow it always the noble and gentle form

To be taken at last by the only one that I love

Whose coming attracts me as magnet attracts a sword

With the charming aspect of

An adorable redhead

Her hair is of gold you might say

A lovely lightning that stays

Or the flaunting flame that arrays

Tea-roses fading away

But laugh at me laugh

Men of all places especially people here

Because there’s so much I’m afraid to tell you

So much that you wouldn’t allow me to tell you

Have pity on me