The Fired Schoolteacher
Three characters of proven banality accost each other with diverse poetical phrases (got a match, I beg of you, what time is it, how many leagues to the next town?), in an indifferent countryside and engage in a conversation whose echoes will never reach us. Before you is the twenty-acre field: I am its worker, its secret blood, its catastrophic stone. I leave you nothing to think.
translated by Paul Auster
Excerpt From Selected Poems of René Char
Rene Char (1907-1988)
Nothing to think, perhaps. But that very thought carries a force. To me this is a poem of the dead weights and old volcanoes at work in our lives.
IM
https://www.thebroad.org/art/anselm-kiefer/fur-rene-char
Featured image accessed at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Céreste_R._C._et_son_chat_1941.jpg
