LA VIGILE PASCALE (en anglais)

ENGLISH :

The Easter Vigil

For my parents during Lent

‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’.

Gospel according to St John, 14:6


And see now
The intense doors of the evening are closing,
And the soul, adorned with saffron branches,
Sails into the space made by the fleshly syllables
Of sentences which are not the centre.

Absolute night returns with the silence…
And God who strikes like lightning
In the quietude of the heart.

This immense solitude up to the heights
In the midst of the vigil of trees in blossom
And the triumph of the cuttings from which they came.
Without haste or asperity.

How marvellous
The vocabulary of glittering water,
Our noses
Full of perfume
Exhaled by the ceaseless circles
Of evangelical roses.

A Name written in letters of sunlight
Haunts the lips,
A name which pronounces life
In its dizzying perfection.

I touch its splendour with my finger
So that
In the night
I can grow!

And I believe, Lord,
That You are the Way,
The Truth and the Life.

Life!

Translated from the French of Athanase Vantchev de Thracy by Norton Hodges
April 2011