Dawn Call
DAWN CALL
( LA CRIÉE D'AUBE )
COLETTE NYS-MAZURE
EBB AND FLOW
When is your darkest hour, your difficult to live hour, your deadly hour?
Is it at dawn, when the light is no more than a wavering promise as the
burden of the day you must raise assails you like a desolate distance to be
run, in vain?
Is it that moment of waking, that ruthless wrench from the web of dreams,
violent recall to the harshest of realities?
Is it the first face you see, the first gesture you make, the first word
you force out?
Is it the emptiness of the morning, when you grind the gears of the task to be done, overwhelmed by the apparent futility of your labours?
Is it at the nub of the day: midday, an hour as disturbing as a deserted esplanade, where you feel watched? Or is it the moving sands of the afternoon, when the hope for growth, metamorphosis even is already sinking?
When the light tenses before fading and hiding?
And what of the night that rises, unrelenting, like icy water, to enshroud everything? What can be howled of the night that engulfs, dense, opaque,
oppressive?
When is your hour of anguish? When the way becomes so narrow that no living soul could pass through the eye of this needle; when the air that you breathe is so rarefied, that standing on tiptoe, it is difficult to fill your lungs? The hour when you mistreat yourself, can't bear yourself nor the other; the hour you dread unable to live or die, when distraught, you swing from one abyss to another, already lost, damned?
When is the hour you celebrate, your hour of glory, when it's a joy to balive, to sing?
Is it that delicate moment in the day, when darkness is brushed aside and everything takes shape as it did that first dawn?
Is it the excitement of waking: I'm alive! whoops the body to the world; I exist in a universe yet to be created! Familiar scents float up, those thousand daily sounds, you touch the sheet, your cheek, the wall, as though
they were a miracle.
Is it the first encounter, the first face of the first hand to stir towards
your face, your hand, the shock of a look, its aperture?
Is it the cosiness of the morning, when you throw yourself body and soul into your work?
Is it the caesura of midday, when past and future are perfectly balanced, like a truth, a promise?
Is it in the heat of the afternoon, when the glow of the hours mellows? Or is it the evening as it slides into night, with its colluding tenderness, its bright whisper of faultless reunions, its completeness?
To sympathise, empathise, I must penetrate your losses and your gluts, your griefs and your celebrations.
(Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen)
FROM THE HIGH SEA
The child has counted the waves again and again; he has ridden astride the foamy crests and drunk the clouds. He has tallied seashells, sorted out starfish and razor clams.
He has lined the beach with fortresses and filled his pockets with silky pebbles. He has aped the walk of crabs. Through his spread fingers, he has sifted the limitless fine sands, and he has basked at length in each of the tide's shining pools. He has woven bracelets of kelp and seaweed.
He licks the persistent savor of salt off his lips and shakes his mane of sandreeds. He takes deep breaths of the pungent spray-filled air.
Before the lighthouse Beacon begins its nightly rounds, the tide will carry him away. With the shrill cry of a seagull.
(Translated by Judy Cochran)
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