Languedoc

Blinding afternoons-red field, green vineyards-

Where passion’s stiletto pierces the heart;

Granite-shattering savagery weathers the land,

Lolloping like a hunchback on the run.


La navette albigeoise: crushed almonds infused

With orange blossom and the strangeness of history,

Whose violence time refines to proud beauty.

Restless, I savour the taste on my tongue,

A stranger to the Cathar sky,

While Albi glowers in dour evening light,

Cathedral-fortress crimsoned with sacrifice.

Inside, the naked dead, reborn from their graves,

Arise exalted on the tide of Judgment Day,

Beneath them the damned, dragged down by demons,

The proud, the envious, the miserly, the angry,

The greedy, the self-indulgent, all dragged down.



The wolfish sun prowls through plane tree arcades

And hypnotized towns, all crumbling plaster

And faded green shutters guarding sly secrets.

Tawny stone bridges still stand, awaiting

Crusaders at the gallop, fallen angels in armour,

Sent to wreak the False God’s wrath.

Earth, scorched and martyred by swords of light!

Slaughterers’ psalms gallop on the air

And the mind clenches in noon’s rigor mortis.


Witness the cathedral cloisters in Elne:

White marble columns, each unique in design,

Fluted or twisted or carved like a pine-trunk,

Replete with detail, etched by human hands,

And saturated with millennial sunlight,

Surfaces matured to mellow cream hue,

Becoming subtle rose or sulphurous yellow.


Land of wraiths where the wind intones in Occitan:

The fierce walls of Aïgues-Morte rise undaunted

From dismal marsh flats pocked with dead lagoons

While, across the Camargue’s sunflower meadows,

Willows wisely bend before the wind’s tirade,

Leaves smelted to molten silver mass.

Solemnly the sun sets over Mende cathedral,

The rose window’s glow still alive in the twilight,

Signal flare to guide the stray soul home.


The Cevennes ridges metamorphose into the distance:

Here and there, among stark rocks, rowanberries

Speckle the blue haze with druidic red.

How long can a man survive, flayed to the bone

By faith and depair, his course uncertain,

Heaven a distant mocking mirage?