On an evening, for example, when the naive tourist has retired <br />from our economic horrors, a master's hand awakens <br />the meadow's harpsichord; <br />they are playing cards at the bottom of the pond, <br />mirror conjuring up favorites and queens; <br />there are saints, veils, threads of harmony, <br />and legendary chromatics in the setting sun. <br />He shudders as the hunts and hordes go by. <br />Comedy drips on the grass stages. <br />And the distress of the poor and of the weak <br />on those stupid planes! Before his slave's vision, <br />Germany goes scaffolding toward moons; <br />Tartar deserts light up; ancient revolts ferment <br />in the center of the Celestial Empire; <br />over stairways and armchairs of rock, a little world, wan and flat, <br />Africa and Occidents, will be erected. <br />Then a ballet of familiar seas and nights, <br />worthless chemistry and impossible melodies. The same bourgeois magic <br />wherever the mail-train sets you down. <br />Even the most elementary physicist feels that it is no longer possible <br />to submit to this personal atmosphere, fog of physical remorse, <br />which to acknowledge is already an affliction. No! <br />The moment of the seething cauldron, of seas removed, <br />of subterranean conflagrations, of the planet swept away, <br />and the consequent exterminations, certitudes indicated <br />with so little malice by the Bible and by the Norns <br />and for which serious persons should be on the alert<br /><br />Arthur Rimbaud<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/historic-evening/
