Jean Garrigue
96
BALLAD FOR HALF HEARTS
The time for thinking is useless,
The time for acting is done;
It
seems in this noisy city
Girded by tracks and by rivers
Not even the sky is natural
With its supple, escaping clouds.
What acting and thinking was done
Was acting that brought us to this.
Wrong bred wrong after wrong,
Every motive was cancerous.
Now we flee from the terraces
Under the ageing heat of the sun.
The loving of splendid limbs
Led but to fruitless fruit;
Mercy and pride carried a mutual
Disease; the blight was transferred
From us to the object; daily
The Promethean wound is consciousness we cannot curb.
Now, retreating from the fire-escape grills
And the virtuous, housewife washing,
We draw down the blinds on our fear and our shame.
The heart, that animal pump, rises
And sinks in the dark, venially pushing
Our blood to its base unfulfillment.
Such evil should stop, we know that,
As we know how the city rots in space.
We put on our clothes of rejection,
0 bridegroom, we lie down in our misery,
And the trust we abandoned witnesses
The multiple murders.
