Since.

AFTER the FLOOD

    Just as the idea of the Flood went subsiding,

    A hare stopped in the swaying clover and flower bells, and said its prayer to the rainbow, through the spider’s web.

    Oh! The precious stones that hid themselves, —the flowers that already were watching.

    In the dirty main street, the stalls rose, and some hauled the boats to the sea piled up as on engravings,

    Blood flowed, at Blue Beard’s, —in the slaughterhouses, in circuses, and where the seal of God white-washed the windows. Blood and milk flowed.

    The beavers built. “Mazagrans” smoked in the coffee bars.

    In the big house of glass still dripping, the mourning children looked on the wondrous pictures.

    A door slammed; and, on the square of the hamlet, the child waved his arms, understood by the wind vanes and the cocks on steeples everywhere, in the bursting shower.

    Madame *** set up a piano in the Alps. Mass and first communions were celebrated at the hundred thousand altars of the cathedral.

    The caravans took off. And Hotel Splendor was built in the chaos of ices and polar night.

    And from then on, the moon heard jackals howling through the deserts of thyme, —and the sabot-clad eclogues growling in the orchard. And, in the violet woods, Eucharis told me it was Spring.

    Gush, pond; —Foam, roll on the bridge and over the woods; —black palls and organs, lightning and thunder, rise and roll; —waters and sorrows, rise and unleash the Floods.

    For since they’ve gone, —oh, the burrowing stones, and the blooming flowers!—the boredom! And the Queen, the Witch who lights her blaze in the earthen pot, won’t ever want to tell us what she knows, that which we do not.

Arthur Rimbaud