Feasts of Hunger

My hunger, Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey.

If I have any taste, it s for hardly anything
but earth and stones.
Dinn! Dinn! Dinn! Dinn!

Let us eat air, rock, coal, iron.
Turn, my hungers.
Feed, hungers, in the meadow of sounds!
Suck the gaudy poison of the convolvuli;
Eat, the stones a poor man breaks,
the old masonry of churches, boulders,
children of floods, loaves lying in the grey valleys!

Hungers, it is bits of black air; the azure trumpeter;
it is my stomach that makes me suffer.
It is unhappiness. Leaves have appeared on earth!
I go looking for the sleepy flesh of fruit.
At the heart of the furrow I pick
Venus' looking-glass and the violet.

My hunger, Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey.

August 1872