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A Poem to Henry: My Friend in Paris
by Daniela Albu
On the Pont Neuf bridge, that's where it all started. It was there where we met.
The end of August golden sun set was
caressing the Seine. While I was looking at him I suddenly realized how
many centuries separated me from the charming man and proud king whose
impenetrable face was now watching over Paris.
I became aware that the Seine saw him
"then", that "he was there" in those long-gone times and that I was
stepping on the same old pavement of Paris. Trying not to see and
hearing the cars passing by on the expressway which follows both banks
of the river, I began to feel a thin, mysterious bridge between me and Henry the IVth.
I could see the human glimpse in his eyes
and his almost smiling face as if he was winking at me whispering: "Let
me show you Paris !" We were now both sharing our secret. He guided me,
indeed.
One can know a city like Paris only walking
on foot, stone by stone, wearing out many a pair of shoes like in the
fairy tales. I was wandering in Paris with a childish enthusiasm
exploring all its corners without discovering entirely the secret of
its charm. I encountered a surprise at every step, an echo from the
past, the unique atmosphere of its "quartiers".
The poetry of the city was writing itself in
flashes which would hurt the eye with the speed and glare of a comet
over the skies. They would disappear only to come back again later,
haunting me in my Bucharest garden while I was gazing at the leaves of
a mulberry tree.
It was like that that I began to write the
Parisian miniatures, photographs of a poet, sepia impressions, small
clouds of smoke lost in the rumour of the real city. I knew that in the
City of Lights, people suffer and people are happy, they are poor or
rich by God's will. Like everywhere in the world one can observe there
the fight for survival and the thirst for power, but Paris has its
artists whom it rarely spoils but who love the city unconditionally.
They are the bridge between poverty and
luxury between victory and defeat, between life and death. The Seine
knows it all. That is why I would always come back on the Pont Neuf for my usual chat with Henry the IVth, looking into his smiling eyes.
I would tell him about the wonders of the
Louvre Museum and how Gericault painted his friend Delacroix as one of
the survivors on "the Raft of Medusa". I would tell him about Victor
Hugo's watercolors in his Place de Vosges house, and about the taste of
white wine by the statue of Louis XIII, about the polite and courteous
Beaumarchais, about the small café on Place de la Bastille where
these days one can observe peripatetic philosophers pausing for an
espresso.
I would go for a small sail on bateau-mouche
and I would come back again to my friend to tell him how I felt tears
in my eyes when I went to Orangeries to visit Monet's water lilies
(nimpheas), and I saw a white marble plaque at the entrance saying that
he left them all as a gift to Paris with the wish to be inaugurated
after his death.
But most of all I could never part with my friend Henry and his wonderful city, and I decided to take them with me in my poems.
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