Poem
Stephen Romer
The French Translation
The French Translation
The French Translation
A copy of Portrait by her unmade bed . . .Embracing in their common hatred
what am I, against the gut alliance
of Catholic Ireland and Catholic France?
But Dedalus, I know you through and through!
We even share a name. Reading you
I sprouted wings and fled. We are both
at an angle to England, travelling south.
Will you, this once, speak for two of us,
direct her simple wilful heart, release
those channels to remorse, possess her mind,
as I come flying humbly on behind?
I doubt you would enter in so far.
What were your ardent ways but a posture
for being in despair. You had the knack
of detaching what you needed from the ache
of merely needing . . . Her brief, stifled yawn
has frazzled my patchwork wings to the bone.
. . . I glimpsed you as I fell, you venerable
heartless survivor, flying out of trouble.
© 1986, Stephen Romer
From: Idol
Publisher: Oxford/Carcanet, Oxford/Manchester
From: Idol
Publisher: Oxford/Carcanet, Oxford/Manchester
Stephen Romer
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1957)
Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire in 1957; he has lived in France since 1981. He was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is now Maître de Conférence at Tours University, France, in the English department. Romer has been Visiting Professor of French at Colgate University, New York, three times. He regularly reviews French poetry and literature for the Guardian and the Times Literary Su...
Poems
Poems of Stephen Romer
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The French Translation
A copy of Portrait by her unmade bed . . .Embracing in their common hatred
what am I, against the gut alliance
of Catholic Ireland and Catholic France?
But Dedalus, I know you through and through!
We even share a name. Reading you
I sprouted wings and fled. We are both
at an angle to England, travelling south.
Will you, this once, speak for two of us,
direct her simple wilful heart, release
those channels to remorse, possess her mind,
as I come flying humbly on behind?
I doubt you would enter in so far.
What were your ardent ways but a posture
for being in despair. You had the knack
of detaching what you needed from the ache
of merely needing . . . Her brief, stifled yawn
has frazzled my patchwork wings to the bone.
. . . I glimpsed you as I fell, you venerable
heartless survivor, flying out of trouble.
From: Idol
The French Translation
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