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Prologue

Author: 
Anise Koltz

Reading from Southbank Centre's Poetry Parnassus festival, 2012. Reading in French.

Translated from the French by Anne-Marie Glasheen:
 
Prologue
 
Life is no long quiet river
but a bloodbath
 
Yet you ask me for
poetry decorated with flowers
with little birds
 
I’m sorry Ladies and Gentlemen
each of my poems
buries your dead
 
            *
 
I advance without a net
from one star to another
sliding through black holes
I leap from moons to suns
 
I rock at the edges
of the earth
already no longer belonging to it
 
Because this poem is a lie
it has the right to be beautiful
 

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