On the beaches of bitter salt
in the harsh vastness of the shore,
I savour, through my nostrils
the odour of iodine from the sea.
What exchanges of naked forces
intersect and insinuate themselves
with collisions, with leaps,
at that hour of monumental life
where all embraces and is transformed:
winds, mountains, waves, skies!
Celebration floods my entire being:
the ardour of the universe
re-animates and penetrates me.
What matter to have suffered,
to have had my heart chafed with the chain
– now here, now gone – of human pain,
what matter! – I feel
my renewed body quiver replete with joy
to be dipped alive and holy
in this vat
of terrific and savage substance.
The rock breaks the wave, the wave wears the rock.
A silence is born: the blows
of mighty thunderclaps shake the cliffs;
a distant island is nourished by the sea
and rises ever more so as the shore sinks.
Bright sun the sand drinks…
– O to return to the dawns of the world –
all is confused, all destroys itself, all is enriched.
In a single second one lives a hundred years.
And what matters this mourning of time:
Death!
Without it
never would eternity appear so fresh;
man who kills and who gives life,
you must learn
to rejoice in death.
Death, life – and their intoxication!
O, all the waves of the ocean…
Sealed coffins, open cradles,
gestures of hope or distress,
limbs naked and bared chests,
I am suddenly, in your rough caress,
possessed with the insane desire
to set off one day, to the very end,
and out there lose myself in your multitude.