Vive la France!

It's the 14th of July and I cannot but celebrate, with a few French poems, Bastille Day. Yesterday I saw the common press conference of Macron and Trump on CNN and I can truly say I wish we also had such an intelligent president, "un vrai diplomate", unlike the joker next to him.

“La poésie est mémoire, mémoire de l'intensité perdue.”

Now, while the parade is taking place on the Champs Elysees, I would like to celebrate this day with some French poems by a writer that, up until last year, when he passed away at the age of 93, was considered "the greatest French living poet" and whose poems have been studied in the last decades by French high school students. His name is YVES BONNEFOY (1923 - 2016) and he was not only a poet but also an impressive essayist, a very good translator of Shakespeare's work, a professor at "College de France", an art historian and an exceptional critic.

Here is the first part of one of his beautiful poems, "Summer night":

Nuit d'été 

Il me semble, ce soir,
Que le ciel étoile, s'élargissant,
Se rapproche de nous ; et que la nuit,
Derrière tant de feux, est moins obscure.
Et le feuillage aussi brille sous le feuillage. Le vert, et l'orangé des fruits mûrs, s'est accru, Lampe d'un ange proche ; un battement De lumière cachée prend l'arbre universel.
Il me semble, ce soir.
Que nous sommes entrés dans le jardin, dont l'ange
A refermé les portes sans retour.