Here I am in front of everyone a man full of sense
Knowing life and death what a living can
to know
Having experienced the pains and joys of love
Having sometimes known how to impose his ideas
Knowing several languages
Having traveled quite a bit
Having seen the war in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost his best friends in the dreadful struggle
I know old and new as much as a single man
could both know
And without worrying today about this war
Between us and for us my friends
I judge this long quarrel between tradition and invention
Of Order and Adventure

You whose mouth is made in the image of God’s
Mouth that is order itself
Be indulgent when you compare us
To those who were the perfection of order
We who seek adventure everywhere

We are not your enemies
We want to give you vast and strange domains
Where mystery in bloom offers itself to whoever wants to pick it
There are new fires of colors never seen
A thousand imponderable fantasies
To which we must give reality
We want to explore the enormous goodness land where everything is silent
There is also the time that we can hunt or bring back
Pity us who are still fighting at the frontiers
Of the unlimited and the future
pity for our mistakes pity for our sins

Here comes summer, the violent season
And my youth is dead like the spring
O Sun it is the time of ardent Reason
And I wait
To follow her always the noble and gentle form
That she takes so that I only love her
She comes and pulls me like an iron magnet
She looks lovely
Of an adorable redhead

Her hair looks like gold
A beautiful flash that would last
Or those strutting flames
In the withering tea-roses

But laugh laugh at me
Men from everywhere especially people from here
Because there are so many things that I dare not tell you
So many things you wouldn’t let me say
Have mercy on me.