La Bastide Familiale – Emile Ripert

The family bastide

I am there, in a corner, under the almond tree, without doing
A gesture, watching the golden stars grow pale,
Like a child who sleeps like a grandmother,
Contemplating the paternal house which sleeps.

The sound of crazy summers on singing holidays
Ran away, and up there the hundred year old furniture
Keeping their eternal attitude of waiting,
And, little by little, their wood takes the form of time.

Sleep, ö old house, in the night of Provence!
Tomorrow April will put her laughter around you
And her roses to the sea breeze which swings them,
And birds will come to nest among the roofs;

“My grandfather also bequeathed to me by the hands of my mother the Bastide which he had arranged, enlarged, embellished in the countryside of La Ciotat, and whose stay made me a poet, if I am, it It is through this that I felt the beauty of the light, the splendor of the nights, the intoxication of the springs, the solar solemnity of the summers, the gentle melancholy of the autumns. It was there that I heard the mistral moan or sing through the boughs of the pines and the sea swell which, on easterly days, rolls its poignant symphony on our shores. It is there that I have always found good rest, the port, the asylum for my physical and moral fatigue, it is there that I hope one day to close my eyes to the light, as I have opened them to it. an autumn evening. More than all the poets that I have known, this one that I did not know, by giving me the stay of my meditation and the instrument of my expression, allowed me to realize my dreams, which are not maybe his own. "
E. Ripert
from the manuscript "the poets that I knew"

SECADOU
Bastide garden

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