AUTUMN CROCUSES – Poetry, by Guillaume Apollinaire

AUTUMN CROCUSES

The meadow is venomous but lovely in autumn, the cows graze there and are slowly poisoned. The colchicum colour of shadow and lilac, flowers there your eyes resemble that flower. Violet shades like their shadow that autumn and slowly your eyes empoison my life. The children arrive from school, what a fracas, dressed in smocks and playing harmonicas. They gather the crocuses that are like mothers, daughters of their daughters your eyelids’ colour, that beat as the flowers beat in the wild breeze. The herdsman sings and sings quite softly, while slowly, mooing, the cows abandon, forever this wide field flowered by autumn. (Guillaume Apollinaire) http://www.amazon.com/Zone-Selected-Poems-Guillaume-Apollinaire/dp/1590179242/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

This bilingual edition of Apollinaire’s poetry represents the full range of his achievement from traditional lyric verse to the pathbreaking visual poems he called calligrams, from often-anthologized classics to hitherto-untranslated gems, from poems of cosmic breadth to a poem about his shoes.