Tomorrow it will be a year since, at Audaux, I gathered the flowers of which I have
spoken on the wet prairie. Today is the most beautiful day of Eastertide.
I am sunk deep in the blue of the plains, across woods, across meadows across fields.
How, O my heart, did you not die a year ago?
My heart, I have again given you the Calvary of seeing once more this village where
I have suffered so, these roses bleeding in front of the presbytery, these lilacs that kill me in their sad flowerbeds.
I have remembered my old anguish and I do not know how it is that I have not
collapsed on the ochre path, forehead in the dust.
Why is the day so beautiful and why was I born?
I would have wished to place on your calm knees the weariness that rends my soul,
that beds down like a beggarwoman in the ditch.
To sleep. To find repose. To sleep forever beneath the sudden blue showers,
beneath the cool lightning.
To feel no more. To know no longer of your existence.
I seem to feel the lack, in my deepest soul, with a heavy silent sob, of someone
who is not here. I write. And the countryside rings out with joy:
“She went down to the deepest prairie, and like the prairie she was all abloom.”
Nothing. I have nothing more, nothing more to sustain me.