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Under what remains
Of a mild September sun,
Perfumed, bright & gilded like a bee,
My mind returns to that little old woman,
An orchard, her small, hurried steps
Ten years ago today.

And just as in previous years
I long to shake down the pears
In that neglected orchard;
Long to believe her there,
Her handkerchief knotted round her head,
Her face crinckled as she concentrates
On her September task,
There, under the pear trees,
Filling up her apron

"Awaited so
Through summers listless in each yard,
Summers which pour down their ennui in silence
Under the ancient sun of my afternoon
Made ponderous through silence,
By lovers, lost in visions of love:
Loving beneath the wisteria, its shade
Gracing the yard of some peaceful house
Hidden beneath branches
Spread across my own distances
And my infantile summers:
Those who dream of love or weep for childhood."

- From Summer to Summer

#poetry

"The curtains are drawn at desolate junctions...
The fresh? They've abandoned their spinning, gone outside
For the freshness and gaiety of far-off greenery...
...Somewhere inside, a sobbing piano..."

- The Griefs of Summer (Sunday)

The rain is, in a sense,
The sole sad friend of those who find themselves
Thinking, wide awake, until the dawn,
Who, in bed, alone, with fevered hands,
Listen to it, soothed. They like the company
Of its faint moan across the sleeping plain,
Its rustling in the garden all night long.

- "On the Great Grey Road (Sur ce Grand Chemin Gris...)”

These poems are bathed in sunlight, amid flower-strewn fields and gardens, or infused with dusky, moonlit rain, gently playing against bedroom windows. There is love, unrequited and dreamed of, childhood scenes remembered with fondness and joy, and there are intimations of war, loss and grief. The poems are tragically few, but enough to know that the Great War wasted the potential of another young writer whose promise was only partially realised.