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Moonlight
Moonlight - Alasdair Gray
'Clair de Lune' by Jules Laforgue. I forget who translated it. I don't understand the French that Laforgue originally used. My translation is not quite the original one.
Moonlight
O Moon, to be lost with you in midnight sky
drinking your font of holy water dry!
That I cannot lie on your astral body
afflicts me like kicks in the appendix.
O moon, I am all yours when you add light
to warmth of an enchanting autumn night,
or through ragged clouds as the wild wind raves,
gleam on stormy seas and ship-wrecking waves.
Blind asteroid, too cold to melt the wings
of we who fall exhausted from your height!
Pale night skull, balder than a bureaucrat!
Pill, waking no one from lethargic state!
Huntress Diana, give from Cupid’s quiver
an arrow, a lead-pointed, to wield like
hypodermic needle and inoculate
my heart against what makes me so unfit:
life. Tonight I wash my hands of it.
uncollected, first published The Dark Horse , 20th Anniversary issue, 2015, © Alasdair Gray 2015, used by permission of the author