The Hospital

Hospital! Hospital on the canal!
Hospital in July!
There is a fire in the room!
While ocean liners blow their whistle on the canal!

(O! do not come near the windows!)
Emigrants are crossing a palace!
I see a yacht in the tempest!
I see flocks on all the ships!
(It is better to keep all the windows closed,
One is almost sheltered from the outside.)
It is like a hot-house on snow,
You are going with a woman's churching on a stormy day,
You have a glimpse of plants shed o'er a linen sheet,
There is a conflagration in the sun,
And I cross a forest full of wounded men.

O! now at last the moonlight!

A jet of water rises in the middle of the room!
A troop of little girls half open the door!

I catch a glimpse of lambs on an island in the meadows!
And of beautiful plants on a glacier!
And lilies in a marble vestibule!
There is a festival in a virgin forest!
And an oriental vegetation in a cave of ice!

Listen! the locks are opened!
And the ocean liners stir the water of the canal!

O! but the sister of charity poking the fire!

All the beautiful green rushes of the banks are on fire!
A vessel full of wounded men rocks in the moonlight!
All the King's daughters are in a bark in the storm!
And the Princesses are going to die in a field of hemlock!

O! do not leave the lattices ajar!
Listen: the ocean liners still are blowing their whistle on
the horizon!

Some one is being poisoned in a garden!
People are banqueting in the house of their enemies!

There are stags in a town that is besieged!
And a menagerie amid the lilies!
There is a tropical vegetation in a coal-pit!
A flock of sheep is crossing an iron bridge!
And the lambs of the meadow are coming sadly into the room!

Now the sister of charity lights the lamps,
She brings the patients their meal,
She has closed the windows on the canal,
And all the doors to the moon.