COME, TALK TO VILLON

Our city hangs its poets and prisoners

to the pulse of that magnificent river

filling every lover and artist

with its lucid clear voices.

In the morning, the heavy city-gate a giant mouth

yawning indifferently over the hanged men

over us who find so little to laugh about 1

in the rhythm of these windswept streets.

Men arrive in groups, clusters of grapes,

others alone, prepared to tear the stones of the city

to fill its belly with chaos and fear; like me,

they clap a beat brushed by poverty.

Its pulse to steal brought me to prison,

my impulse to give freed me: to stay here

I must die by the hand of the executioner,

but to leave means I must die in every other way.

PUBLISHED IN THE PACKINGTON REVIEW JOURNAL, SPRING 2025

1 The French poet François Villon (1431-?) was condemned to die but his sentence was

commuted to banishment from Paris, and from this time on nothing is known of him. The

line “who find so little to laugh about” echoes a line in the last stanza of his “Ballade of

the Hanged.”