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Return to a Frontier
I have come back to the world of the ancestors I have come back from far far away I have returned from the cities of fire and steel Where the new race ferments in the fantasia of a crucible The boat arrived with my smiling chimeras It brought along the words of numberless nations The tumult of the American nights is stifled The savage desires have gone to sleep And the far-ache is over And the language is far I learned in the immigrant fever An autumn rain is falling on the little frontier-town And on the hearts of the dream-stricken men And all is as once it was The world of my childhood comes back on tiptoe It comes back with patois-words and anguished songs Is that the Antichrist who knocks at the door The frontiermen have their eyes in the clouds Death in their eyes Death in their mouths The workers flee into silence The creek slumbers near the gardens No Man's Land rolls shards A church-bell rings in desolation Black towers bend down The meadows are trampled by the wind Generations weep in the attics The ravines are disquiet All the nettles are rusted There is a great fall in the spirits There is a great fear in the eyes of women I would like to cry one word Frontier I carry it in myself Like a malevolent heritage Like a tranced music Here is the reign of the slow death Here people die a thousand times I would like a megaphone to shout one word Liberty O word that followed me in America O multilated word O archaic word The heart of this continent is lacerated It falters with the verb of the tyrannous possession I think of the Columbian reality I think of the far land without frontiers Where Europe has found peace Where Europe finds the magical colloquies I can no longer look at these spasms of dying This delirium of the slow decomposition I hear rain pattering on the frontier-town And the night shaking with tears