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 Paul  Verlaine

Streets – O La Rivière Dans La Rue!

O the river in the street!

Fantastically you’ll meet

Behind high five-foot walls,

Never a sound does it make,

Its water pure yet opaque,

Peacefully there it crawls.  

The roadway’s broad and so

The waters widely flow,

Pale as the dead, and lack

Reflections of aught but mist,

Though the dawn will insist

On cottages yellow and black.

Twilight of a Mystical Evening

Memory with Twilight glows

And trembles on the fiery horizon

Of burning Hope that shrinks and grows

Like some mysterious partition

Where the flowers in profusion

– Dahlias, lilies, tulips and marigolds –

Fly round a trellis in their circulation

Among the heady exhalation

Of heavy perfumes, whose warm poison

– Dahlias, lilies, tulips and marigolds –

Drowning my senses, soul and reason,

Mingles in their immense confusion

Memory with Twilight’s glows.