In the Snare of Words

After Yves Bonnefoy*

O poetry

I know that you are scorned and rejected,

Thought play-acting, if not a lie,

Weighed down by the faults of language,

The water called brack and bad that you offer those

Who thirst even so, but turn away, disappointed, towards death.

And yet I know that if anything on Earth remains

Besides the wind, the ridge, the sea,

Yours will be the first speech to break the long silence,

The first words to catch fire beneath the dead world's wood.

*Abstracted and imitated from Yves Bonnefoy’s long poem Dans le Leurre des Mots. Bonnefoy, who died in 2016 at the age of 93, has been called “perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century” (Enyclopædia Britannica). For his full poem, in a bilingual edition, see Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks, translated by Hoyt Rogers (2006).