Death Love Life

I believed I could break the depth the immensity

By my grief naked without contact without echo

I lay in my prison with virgin doors

Like a sensible dead man who was able to die

A dead man uncrowned but of his nothingness

I lay on the absurd waves

Of the poison absorbed for the love of ashes

Solitude seemed more alive than blood

I wanted to break up life

I wanted to share death with death

Surrender my heart to the void and the void to life

Erase everything to leave nothing neither window nor steam

Nothing ahead nothing behind nothing entirely

I had eliminated the icicle from the joined hands

I had eliminated the wintery bone structure

Of the vow to live that cancels itself

You came the fire then rekindled itself

The shadow yielded the cold below frosted

And the earth covered itself

With your fair flesh and I felt light

You came solitude was defeated

I had a guide on earth I knew

To direct myself I knew I was immoderate

I moved forward I gained space and time

I went towards you I went without end towards the light

Life had a body hope spread out its sail

Sleep streamed with dreams and the night

Promised the dawn trusting eyes

The rays of your arms parted the fog

Your mouth was wet with the early dew

The dazzled rest replaced the fatigue

And I adored love as in my first days

The fields are ploughed the factories radiate

And the wheat nests in an enormous swell

The harvest the grape harvest have innumerable witnesses

Nothing is simple nor singular

The sea is in the eyes of the sky or of the night

The forest gives the trees their safety

And the walls of the houses have a common skin

And the roads always cross each other

People are made to get along

To understand each other to love each other

Have children who will become parents of mankind

Have children with neither hearth nor home

Who will reinvent mankind

And nature and their homeland

That of all mankind

That of all times.

Paul Éluard

translated by Guy Tiphane