Jean Ferrat - Louis Aragon - The disguised birds

Original Title: "Les oiseaux déguisés"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1994

All those who speak of marvels
Their fables hide sobs
And the colors of their ears
Always to complaints alike
Give their tears for water

The painter sitting in front of his canvas
As he ever painted what he sees
What he sees his story veils
And his darkness are stars
Like singing changes the voice

His secrets which he exhibits everywhere
Are disguised birds
His gaze make things beautiful
And people take for roses
The sorrow by which he is broken

My life in the distance, my stranger
What I was, I left it
And the shades of love changed
Like is turning brown in the ferns
The nightsummer dream

Fall, fall, lengthy fall
Like the shout of the glazier
From street to street and I sing to myself
A tune of which slowly is surprised
The one who is unable to pray anymore

All poems by Louis Aragon.

Dominique A - Everything will be like before

Original Title: "Tout sera comme avant"
Year: 2004

Everything will be like before
Under the summer coats
Like before existing
Like before
In the congested yard
Girls sitting in a line
Some riders

Everything will be like before
When you'll remember
The snows would have melted
On the clogged earth
In the stumbling evening
I'll tell you
Everything will be like before
I promise it to you

At last, coming back from the avalanche
from the fire perched on the branches
came out out of the long black path

Each drags a child one evening
With a look of having in himself
Absorbed all the nights
Since the beginning
Everything will be like before
Everything will be
Like before

Everything will be like before
When you'll remember
The outskirts of school
Where we were thrown
And the stumbling evening
In the clogged yard
And the merry glass

My legs which come unstuck
Everything will be like before
To start rising
The sky has come to the end of its time
Well enough
Under the scraps of summer
I'd tell you so much
I promise it to you

Everything will be like before
Everything will be like before
Everything will be like before

Monique Morelli - Ronsard - To drink over the tender grass

Original Title: "Pour boire dessus l'herbe tendre"
Text: Pierre de Ronsard
Year: 1978

To drink over the tender grass
I want to lie down under a bay-tree
And want that Love, with a small blade
Or of flax or of hemp
Tucks up to the side
Her light dress
And half-naked, pour me wine.

The uncertain life of man
From day to day unfolds like
Onto the riverbanks rolls the waves
Then, after our final hour,
Nothing of us remains in the coffin
But a little ash from our bones

I do not wish, as is the custom,
For my tomb to be perfumed with incense,
Nor for scents to be poured over it,
But so long as I am alive
To wear perfume I feel like
And to crown myself with flowers,

Of myself, I want to make myself,
The hair to sastisfy my own self;
I do not want to live for anyone else
Fool the Pelican who hurts himself
For his likes, and crazy the one who lets himself
For his likes work in boredom

Corydon, go and summon my love.
Before that the small boat turned pale
Sends me to the eternal nights,
I want with full cup and with her
To take away the pain
Of my lamentable troubles.

All poems by Ronsard

Jean Ferrat - Aragon - The lilacs

Original Title: "Les lilas"
Text: Louis Aragon
Year: 1970

I dream and I wake up
in a scent of lilac
On which side of sleep
Have I let you here or there

I was sleeping in your memory
And you were forgetting me in a whisper
Or it was the other way around, just because
Was I where you weren't?

I fall back asleep to reach for you
In the country you dreamt about
Nothing there does anything else but to flee and feign
You, you had left it already

In life or in dream
Everything has that peculiar sparkle
Of the perfume which persists
And of a song which flew off

Oh clear night, dark day
My absent one in between my arms
And nothing else in me last
But what you whispered

All Aragon's poems/songs