it is a year of strategy, the bureaucrats,
wiping the blood off their fingers
in the gates of the temple of reason,
have voted to poison the enemy's well
they know their danger,
they need to throw some dead thing
into the living waters
that were once Clairvaux,
and kill the too clean image
in the heart of such a spring
you know, it was once Clairvaux
nine or a dozen murderers,
and a hundred others
with the grime of knavery upon them
go colonize the ancient cloister
on the morrow of the constitution:
and in the shadows of the broken church,
each dead soul starts to blossom
in his sepulcher
cursing the comfortable sun
heaven, with a strange impassivity,
show no particular horror for this grim cartoon:
let's each new sphinx crouch in his iron hermitage
musing the means to end
this leprous noviceship
and no fire falls, no brimstone buries
these absinthial silences
or purifies the poisoned sanctuary to a pile of ash
god is holding you as evidence, Clairvaux;
your faithful glass,
patient of all the grime and blood of the late centuries
suffers the face of the new liberty,
frames out the new fraternity
for all to contemplate:
receives equality and holds it fast
with a firm hug of locks,
that those who have never forgotten
the days of Bernard and the first cistercians
may read the terror of those messages
and fly to keep their freedom
in the servitude of grace