Les poètes [English translation]

These are odd guys who write for a living

or do not have one, depending of the moment.

These are odd guys who walk through the fog

with birdy steps under the wing of songs.

Their soul is stuck under the Seine bridges.

The money in the books they never sold.

Their wife is somewhere at the end of a tune

that tells us about love and forbidden fruit.

They put colors on the grey of the pavement

As they walk it they feel like on the sea.

They wrap ribbons around the alphabet

and walk their words in the street for a stroll.

They sometimes have dogs to share their misery

that lick their hand of writing and friendship,

their snout lit up by the faith

that guides them toward the lands of nonsense.

These are odd guys who look at flowers

and see in their creases the smiles of women.

These are odd guys who sing misfortune

on the heart's pianos and the soul's violins.

Their poor featherless arms remember the wings

that literature will later pin

on their ghost frozen above trash bins

where their verses will die again as an expression of Art.

They walk in the blue yonder inside cities

And know how to stop to bless horses.

They walk among horror with the head in the islands

where the souls of persecutors never drop anchor.

They have paradises some deem artificial,

And their twopenny rhymes are put to jail

as if a building were covered in chains

just because the bourgeois dwell in the sewer.

• Artist:Léo Ferré