Our city hangs its poets and prisoners to the pulse of that magnificent river filling every lover and artist with its lucid clear voices. In the morning, the heavy city-gate a giant mouth yawning indifferently over the hanged men over us who find so little to laugh about in the rhythm of these windswept streets. Men arrive in groups, clusters of grapes, others alone, prepared to tear the stones of the city to fill its belly with chaos and fear; like me, they clap a beat brushed by poverty. Its pulse to steal brought me to prison, my impulse to give freed me: to stay here I must die by the hand of the executioner, but to leave means I must die in every other way.
Note:
The French poet François Villon (1431-?) was condemned to die but his sentence was commuted to banishment from Paris, and from this time on nothing is known of him. The line “who find so little to laugh about” echoes a line in the last stanza of his “Ballade of the Hanged.”
Swedish-born Gunilla Theander Kester is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009) and co-edited The Still Empty Chair: More Writings Inspired by Flight 3407 (2011) and The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407 (2010). Dr. Kester has published many poems in Swedish anthologies and magazines, including Bonniers Litterära Magasin. She lives near Buffalo, NY where she teaches classical guitar.