Since summer broke over it
the last lightning bolt, thunderclap,
the silence has never left
the moor.
All around it, out there, the upright towers,
shake their bells between their fingers,
around it, harnesses rasp,
with their three-tier high-stacked load,
around it at the edge of the firs,
the wheel creaks in its rut,
but no noise has the strength
to pierce a space so powerful and dead.
Since the summer of heavy thunder,
the silence has not stirred
and the moor, where evenings plunge
over mountains of sand
and boundless brush
stretches to the furthest distance.
Even the winds fail to stir the branches
of old larches, that incline
yonder, mirrored in the marshes,
defiant and abstract their eyes;
alone in their journeys,
the silent shadows of clouds,
graze it, or sometimes, high above
a gliding flight of great birds.
Since the last lightning fork rent the earth,
nothing has bitten on the authoritarian silence.
Those who traversed its vastness,
whether at dawn or close of day,
all have suffered the dread disquiet
of the unknown that it inoculates.
Like a prodigal and sovereign force
it prevails, unceasingly, unchanged;
the sombre walls of black firs
deny a view to the distance, towards paths of hope;
as giant dreaming junipers
frighten the footfalls of travellers;
and intricate paths like signs
interweave in curves and crafty lines,
and constantly the sun displaces mirages
towards which distractedly she moves.
Since the lightning forged by the storm,
the bitter silence in all four corners of the moor
has not changed at all.
The old shepherds, broken by their hundred years
and their old dogs, worn out like rags,
gaze on it sometimes, over soundless plains
on dunes of gold bedecked with shadow.
It sits, in vastness, at the edge of night.
In the creases of ponds, waters have taken fright,
the moor is veiled, and all grows pale,
each leaf to each shrub hearkens
and before it the flaming sunset
stifles the brandished cries of its light.
And the villages close by,
beneath the thatch of their roofs
are in dread of sensing it, out there,
the all-powerful, that which does not move;
doleful with boredom and impotence,
they are rooted there, held by its presence,
as if keeping watch, in dread of seeing,
suddenly, through loosening mists,
in the moon, at evening,
the silver eyes of its mysteries.