Now on a silent summer night
Caught me the melancholy.
I was walking, wandering,
Wondering 'where am I going'
On an empty dusty road
That my legs solidly followed.
Through the shaky street lamps' light,
Just one single word was brought out
By the blackguard of an endless see
Intruded from the deepest embassy.
'Élet', that was the foreign word,
Whose meaning ensnared the world:
La vie, Leben or any Life or birth,
Still just concepts holding little worth.
'Élet' I echoed by laughing,
And passed the road embarrassing
Myself by thinking of that notion
Which had never given me emotion.
A word which filled me with filthy void,
And made me unable to avoid
Falling into a senseless sorrow,
Lowering me lower and more low.
I got to be hardly stressed;
Why this mysterious word pressed
On me so cruelly the wrong,
Making me depressed a life time along.
Even if I should have cried for resort,
I was still walking sine a sort
In my mind that's not a garden of Eden,
Or just I was, by myself, mistaken.
In some or other fairy way,
My road was riding further away;
Just as in Don Quixote's battle of glory,
I was walking against Melancholy.
My very first English poem, written in 2013, Algeria.