“The Damned Women” read by Andria Williams
From the new edition of The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian.
Like pensive cattle lying on a beach,
they turn and gaze into the ocean swell.
Feet probe for loving female feet; hands reach
for hands with languor or a desperate chill.
Some, with hearts full of intimate confessions,
in shadowy groves where little rivers chide,
write out the love of anxious adolescence
by carving letters into fresh green wood
Others, like sisters, stride majestically
through desertscapes where phantoms live in crags,
where rose volcanic for Saint Anthony
his great Temptation’s naked, purple dugs.
Many there are who, when the fire dies down
deep in a cave where ancient heathen met,
call you, O Bacchus, husher of chagrin,
to cure a fever or subdue a fit.
Others, who have a taste for monkish dress
and hide a lash beneath the robe they wear,
on lonely nights out in the wilderness
mix pleasure’s foam with a tormented tear
O virgins, demons, saints, monstrosities
spirits who scorn the actual universe
and seek the void, satyrs and devotees
as full of cries of rapture as of tears,
you whom my soul has followed to your Hell,
poor sisters, let me cherish as I mourn
all of your sorrows, all your great thirsts, all
your hearts (each one a love-tormented urn).
From The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Aaron Poochigian. Translation copyright © 2022 by Aaron Poochigian. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Andria Williams is the author of the novel THE LONGEST NIGHT (Random House, 2016), which was Amazon's Debut Novel of the Month for January of that year, and a Barnes and Noble "Discover" pick. She is currently editor-in-chief of Wrath-Bearing Tree literary journal. She is working on another novel.