Photo by Joao. For full effect,view it large

Yellow light imprints silhouettes Of leaves

Fluttering from the branches Of trees, and memories

Of trees, against the far wall Made of bone.

Look! How giant this moment grows, As it unfurls into the sky,

And passes into the next one.

Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune - Paul Verlaine

We sit here in the sun; Sunday morning, dragonflies Dancing, summer is high. You say, “It will be a hot day.” I nod, and stay silent, gazing at Another yellow dandelion in The grass, another dropped Splinter of the sun.

The day grows old, so do our Cells, the loves that we hoard In them, and the salt that crusts Our shirts as we bend to dig In the garden we are growing For this brief season given To us both, on the same earth.

O! What song will be ours For the night to come? What glaze Will coat our cupped hands As we drink again and again From the fountain that stands at the center, as it leaps Into the pale moonlight?

A song, set to Debussy's 'Clair de Lune', for N & V (recently wed), for the incidental happiness they, perhaps without intending, brought to my Sunday morning.

Your soul is like a landscape fantasy, Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise, Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.

Singing in minor mode of life's largesse And all-victorious love, they yet seem quite Reluctant to believe their happiness, And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,

The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming, Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees, And makes the marbled fountains, gushing, streaming-- Slender jet-fountains--sob their ecstasies.

Translated from the French by Norman R. Shapiro. You can read it in the original French here

Notes: This poem, "Claire de Lune", had been set to music by the French composer Debussy on the piano, and has be called his greatest composition ever. You can listen to it here. It certainly is quite lovely.