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from the FRENCH of Arthur Rimbaud

FIRST COMMUNIONS
                                1
It’s idiotic, these hill churches where
Say fifteen ugly brats defile the walls,
Mauling the holy babble with their burr,
whilst a grotesque intones in sweaty shoes:
But sunlight wakens, as it flecks the choir,
Some ancient colours in the crooked glass.

The flint still smells of mother earth. You’ll see
Every place you look these dirty stones
In rutting fields which quiver solemnly
And bring thick corn near, down the ochre lanes,
Scorched shrubbery in which the sloes turn blue,
Ripe blackberries and roses overblown.

They tart these barns up once a century
With a diluted wash of curdled milk:
If wacky mysteries are to the fore
By Mary’s niche, some saint made out of stalks,
Flies smelling nicely of manure or beer
Are on the sunlit floorboards gorging wax.

Each child is faithful to a hearth and home
Of simple cares, good brutalising jobs.
All leave the church forgetting that their skin
Crawls where Christ’s priest has laid his fingertips.
The priest is paid a roof cooled by an elm
To leave these bronzed heads for the sun to lap.

His first black coat—and lovely cakes as well!
Beneath the Bonaparte or Drummer Boy:
Mary and Joseph in bright prints and all,
With loving tongues stuck out excessively!
(He’ll get two cards when he starts Sunday School.)
—His only thoughts from this important day.

The girls keep church up for the happiness
Of being called class pussy by the runts
Who arse around after the services:
Lads destined for the chic of army towns
From low cafés deride grand terraces,
In spivvy jerkins chanting dirty songs.

The curate picks out drawings for the young;
When, vespers over, in his yard, the air
Fills up with a dance-music’s distant hum,
In spite of sacred edicts that say no
He feels his toes itch and his shanks beat time.
—Black pirate night docks on the golden sky.

                                2
The priest has seen, among the catechists
From the rich suburbs somewhere around here
An unknown little girl with eyes downcast,
Pale forehead, and nice parents at the door.
‘On the Great Day, when God himself has noticed,
Snow will fall from the fonts upon her brow!’

                                3
The Great Day’s eve: the pallid child goes limp!
Stronger than the high anthems bleakly soughing
At first a shiver—though her bed’s not damp—
A superhuman shiver: ‘I am dying …’

As if with love from stupid sisters stolen,
Her hand defeated on her heart, she scores
The Angels off, the Jesuses, white Virgins,
And calmly her soul drinks its conqueror.

Oh Lord! …—In cadences the liturgy …
Red brows are bathed by skies moiréd with greens …
Great snow-cloths stained with blood, sacred and pure
From breasts celestial, fall around the suns!

—For her virginities, those past, to come,
She gnaws the cool of your Forgivenesses,
But they are icier, Oh Queen of Zion,
Than larder marmalades or water lilies!

                                4
The Virgin’s just the virgin in the book
And mystical elations crack, defunct.
Boring etched images instead are stuck
Up on a ledge, bad woodcuts, coloured prints.

A vaguely shameless curiosity
Alarms her sky-blue dream, caught in surprise
Among celestial tunics; she lurks by
The linen veil across Christ’s nakedness.

She wants, she wishes, in her soul at loss,
Her pillowed forehead creased by cries unheard,
To make the utmost flash of tenderness
Last longer, drooling. Shadows fill the yard.

The child can take no more. She arches up
Her little loins and tears the drapes ajar
To let the coolness of the bedroom slip
Over her stomach and her breasts on fire.

                                5
She wakes. It’s twelve. The windowpanes are white.
Inside the blue and moon-illumined bed
She’s been by a white Sunday vision bought.
Yet she dreamed red. Her nose is full of blood.

And feeling chaste indeed, her feeble thoughts
Ache for her love to rise to God, and gasps
For night when heart exults, submits,
Beneath God’s gentleness (and more, she hopes).

For the unbodied Virgin Mother Night,
Which bathes young passions in grey silences,
For that strong Night she thirsts, when the bled heart
May pour revolt without stern witnesses.

Playing at Victim and at little wife,
Her star sees as, a candle in her grasp,
She finds the courtyard where a damp blouse waves
A white ghost; she dispels the black roof’s ghost.

                                6
Her holy night she spends in a latrine;
White air flows to her candle from roof slats;
The purple swarthiness of a wild vine
Collapses this side of the next-door yard.

A heart of light’s made by her skylight’s gash
Where low skies ruddify the window glass
With gold. The paving stinks of gutter wash,
Enduring shadows still crammed dark with sleep.

                                7
Who’ll tell about her languorous, squalid grace,
And of the hate she’ll feel, you filthy fools
Whose holy work deforms the universe,
When finally the pox eats this sweet girl?

                                8
When, having knotted up hysteria,
Grieving she’ll see, beneath their horribly sad
Happiness, her lover dreaming Marys
By the ton, after a night they’ve shared:

‘You know I’ve made you die? I took your mouth,
All that you have, all to be had, your heart . . .
I’m sick: I wish they’d put me with the dead
Whose thirst is quenched by runnels every night.

I was so young and Christ gave me a dose,
Cramming me to my gullet with disgust.
You kissed my gorgeous hair as thick as fleece.
Agh, go away! You’re fine, for you are just

‘A man, and you don’t think the woman most
In love, buried in shame which terror jerks,
Is the most prostituted and downcast
And all her urges for you are mistakes!

‘My First Communion went in a flash.
I never felt your kiss, as for embrace
My heart and flesh, adhering to your flesh,
Are crawling with the putrid kiss of Christ.’

                               9
The soul corrupted, the soul left desolate,
Will feel your overflow of malediction.
They will have bedded in your lasting Hate,
Escaped from passion for oblivion.

Messiah! Energy’s eternal thief,
Two thousand years, for your own pallor’s sake,
With shame and migraine you’ve nailed to the earth
The sorrowing minds of maids, or let them shriek.

Arthur Rimbaud (translated by Alan Marshfield)

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