J'habitais là [English translation]

At my door I heard someone knocking

Three timid taps

A man that old age had covered

With attractive wrinkles

As we find ourselves face to face

I feel that he is looking for

Something to say but an angel passes 1

I throw him a line

Are you selling something?

Calendars, posing cats

For your hospice, a tombola

But he blurts out “I used to live here”

I did not know how to reply to him

Except to say “Come in”

The time to pour a dark coffee

You will tell me

It must have changed I imagine

I feel he is lost

The kitchen is American

Stuck on partitions

He tells me I am looking for, I don’t even know what

Memories of arrows and quivers

My lead soldiers can no longer fight

In your plaster-boarded house

But what, I wasn’t about to to re-fit the plasterboard for him

To hear him talk I had pillaged his house

But the door of memories is still half open

So I took a piece of chalk

And on the floor

I drew some big shapes

So that he could piece together

His memories that were clearing off

Buried

There, mother’s piano

Here, my bed

That night the floorboard creaks

My big brother isn’t asleep, is loading a bag

He whispers to me “You must go back to sleep”

I see he wears a uniform

I didn’t know what to reply

But I understood

What there was in the shadow

And that he’d had taken from him

A disappearing childhood

And wouldn’t come back

He will murmur one more time

I lived here

1. a moment of silence when nobody speaks