Jean Baptiste Greuze – Bared to Dawn

“Shadow”

I have loved being in love;
perhaps that’s why it has not loved me.
That’s how a handsome lover
behaves with a lovestruck child.
I’ve loved the sun too much
and fed up with begging
to the doors of the days
I’ve become like the frond of a fern
that prefers to live in the shade
rather than bare the sun.
And so I trouble myself about a house
in which lamp- and sunlight
have been tempered for the eyes
and where the sober lines of a face
and where the serenity of a friendship stand
as the shadow of a tree
arched
above my head.