Il n’est pas forcément besoin d’un crayon pour dessiner une pomme. Les poètes y arrivent très bien avec des mots, souvent très simples. J’en ai rassemblé ici quelques uns de ceux que j’aime bien.
Anjela Duval, raconte dans Fleur de pommier les fleurs des pommiers colorant les quatre coins de l’horizon, les paysans disparus mais toujours présents à travers les arbres qu’ils ont greffés et le merveilleux travail des abeilles portant les pollens d’une fleur à l’autre symbole de la vie toujours renouvelée.
Bleuñv Avaloù
E pevar c’horn an dremmwel
Avalenned e bleuñv
War an uhel war an izel
Strewet war gement kleuz.
Treid aval-red, bet imboudet
Gant kouerien bremañ er vered,
Marv pell ’zo lod anezhe
Met o labour bepred aze.
O vleuniañ bep bloaz un drugar
Bokidi frondus war bep barr
Gwenan o fraoñval da greisteiz
E kalon pep bleuñvenn nevez
Ha kablus-bras ’velkent an den
Pa diskar, hep keuz, un avalenn
Hêrezh kenedus e dadoù
M’o lezo d’e vugaligoù.
Dylan Thomas, barde gallois et grand alchimiste du verbe, nous rappelle dans Fern hill (la colline des fougères) le paradis perdu, celui que nous avons tenu dans nos mains, mais n’avons su accepter, ni aimer. Cela commence évidemment par :
Au temps où j’étais insouciant sous les pommiers en fleurs…
Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured amoung wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with the daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous amoung the barns
About the happy yard ans singing as the farm was home,
Il the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed amoung stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder : it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over et over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Le chilien Pablo Neruda utilise lui le quotidien pour faire de la poésie, si bien que son quotidien semble traversé par des forces et des lumières qu’il perçoit et qu’il s’efforce de révéler aux autres dans ses textes. Il raconte dans cette ode à la pomme, une pomme qui fut objet de querelles et de désaccord selon bien des croyances et qui prend une toute autre dimension sous sa plume.
oda a la manzana
A ti, manzana,
quiero
celebrarte
llenándome
con tu nombre
la boca,
comiéndote.
Siempre
eres nueva como nada
o nadie,
siempre
recién caída
del Paraíso:
plena
y pura
mejilla arrebolada
de la aurora!
Qué difíciles
son
comparados
contigo
los frutos de la tierra,
las celulares uvas,
los mangos
tenebrosos,
las huesudas
ciruelas, los higos
submarinos:
tú eres pomada pura,
pan fragante,
queso
de la vegetación.
Cuando mordemos
tu redonda inocencia
volvemos
por un instante
a ser
también recién creadas criaturas:
aún tenemos algo de manzana.
Yo quiero
una abundancia
total, la multiplicación
de tu familia,
quiero
una ciudad,
una república,
un río Mississipi
de manzanas,
y en sus orillas
quiero ver
a toda
la población
del mundo
unida, reunida,
en el acto más simple de la tierra:
mordiendo una manzana.
L’œuvre de l’américain Robert Frost est un hommage à la nature et à la vie rurale. Il publie un livre tous les cinq ou six ans (soit seulement une dizaine en 40 ans), mais obtient quatre fois le prix Pullitzer. Poète de la solitude c’est un louangeur de la nature, qui raconte dans Après la cueillette des pommes comment les choses nous reviennent le soir après la journée.
J’étais déjà bien engagé, sur le chemin du sommeil, Et je pouvais dire quelle forme mon rêve allait prendre. Des pommes géantes apparaissent et disparaissent… … je sens aussi l’échelle qui tangue, pendant que les branches des pommiers plient.
After apple-picking
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
Note : Que les francophones se rassurent, on trouve assez facilement les traductions françaises de ces textes (pas toujours très justes car c’est difficile de traduire de la poésie) sur Internet, sauf peut-être pour Anjela Duval.