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      The stars
Spat a pale sun

      The world revolves

And the mud rises
Wet as a leper’s spit

      It’s the dawn of a beautiful day

Elegie

      The town
Bursts open like a soft scab
Red and protruding
On the night’s surface

      This is a nice canker

How well grime blossoms
On the corners of the stone walls

      One needs twenty street sweepers
To make us forget
      one man’s presence

      There are here
Men by millions
And only a few street sweepers

How they squalidly toil

Men stink gloriously from everywhere
      And their stench
      Is persistent

            Here
They are three million who stink
      In small cages

            Thus
This is a big city

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      Words have to cradle
      A soft and vague charm
Dearer for being changing imprecise and sonorous
      And mute and multiple
      And immobile
      And empty

      Words have to cradle
      A vain and soft charm
            That nothing
Impels to be truly sonorous
Otherwise and elsewhere
      But in the mind which saw them appear
            All adorned
            With the halo
            Of genesis
            From where
They came as newborn

Whereas perhaps – we ponder –
            They were
            Not yet empty

Evening

      Fragile
The vanishing light
Weaves an agile cloth
Coloured by a ray
      Still hot
Of red argil

In the air nothing moves

Pale the first starts
      Twinkle

Far from the cities