Dans les ruines d'une abbaye
Seuls tous deux, ravis, chantants !
Comme on s’aime !
Comme on cueille le printemps
Que Dieu sème !
Quels rires étincelants
Dans ces ombres
Pleines jadis de fronts blancs,
De cœurs sombres !
On est tout frais mariés.
On s’envoie
Les charmants cris variés
De la joie.
Purs ébats mêlés au vent
Qui frissonne !
Gaîtés que le noir couvent
Assaisonne !
On effeuille des jasmins
Sur la pierre
Où l’abbesse joint ses mains
En prière.
Les tombeaux, de croix marqués,
Font partie
De ces jeux, un peu piqués
Par l’ortie.
On se cherche, on se poursuit,
On sent croître
Ton aube, amour, dans la nuit
Du vieux cloître.
On s’en va se becquetant,
On s’adore,
On s’embrasse à chaque instant,
Puis encore,
Sous les piliers, les arceaux,
Et les marbres.
C’est l’histoire des oiseaux
Dans les arbres.
In The Ruins of an Abbey
Alone, the two together, ecstatic and singing!
How they love one another!
How they gather the springtime
That God has sown!
What sparkling laughter
Fills these shadows
Once filled with blank faces
And somber hearts!
They have just been married.
They send each other
Various charming cries
Of joy.
Their antics mix with the wind
That shivers!
Joyful expressions that the dark convent
Enhances!
They ruffle the jasmine flowers
On the stone
Where the abbess joins hands
In prayer.
The graves, marked with crosses,
Become a part
Of these games, just slightly bitten
By the nettle.
They chase each other, play hide-and-seek,
And feel the growth
Of your dawn, love, during this night
In the old cloister.
They go about, pecking at one another,
They adore each other,
They embrace at every moment,
And then again,
Under the pillars and the arches
And the marbles.
This is the story of the birds
In the trees.
~ A Poem By Victor Hugo, upon visiting the Abbaye de Villers.
VIRIDITAS
noun
1. A force of nature
2. The real and visceral energy and spirit of life on earth
3. It is particularly associated with abbess Hildegard von Bingen, who wrote of it many times in her mystical treatises.
synonyms: vitality, lushness, verdure, and growth.
...
Just us, amongst the ruins: Myself, Oliver, and several honking geese.
Wandering and wondering about ancient halls, wind-swept cloisters, playing hide and seek between the walls beneath the sky.
My laughter was caught by my breath, stopped short in the vast nave where the pillars went down, rows and rows, to the apse.
The bones were showing. I imagined what it must have been to walk the nave, in the light of candles, and shifting shadows, sent down from the cracks that now opened onto daylight.
Windows on the sky.
A ceiling that touched the clouds.
The height of the nave was even more apparent, now that it was stripped bare. Vertiginous. Vertigo. Can one get vertigo, looking up? I felt a little dizzy when I craned my neck to stare into the depths of the heights.
And all along the walls were ropes and tendrils of ivy, and pockets of grasses growing from brick-shaped-holes.
