Doors open on the sands, doors open on exile,
The keys with the lighthouse keepers, and sun spread-eagled on the threshold stone:
Leave me, dear host, your house of glass on the sands…
Summer, all gypsum, whets its lance-heads in our wounds,
I have chosen a place glaring and null as the bone-heap of the seasons,
And, on all the shores of the world, the ghost of the god in smoke abandons his bed of asbestos.
The spasms of lightning are for the delight of Princes in Taurida.
Dedicated to no shores, imparted to no pages, the pure beginnings of this song…
Others in temples seize on the painted altar horns:
My fame is on the sands! my fame is on the sands!… and it is no error, O Peregrine,
To desire the barest place for assembling on the wastes of exile a great poem born of nothing,
a great poem made from nothing…
Whistle, O slings about the world, sing, O conches on the waters!
I have built upon the abyss and the spindrift
and the sand-smoke. I shall lie down in cistern
and hollow vessel,
In all stale and empty places where lies the
taste of greatness.
....I learn a science from the souls aggression.
St John Perse - Exile
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