Morning Twilight
by Charles Baudelaire

Reveille sounded in the courtyard of the barracks,
And the morning wind blew on the lanterns.

It was the hour when the swarm of guilty dreams
Twists dark-haired adolescents on their pillows;
When, like a bleeding eye which throbs and moves,
The lamp makes a red spot on the daylight;
When the soul, under the weight of a reluctant heavy

body,
Imitates the struggle between the lamp and the daylight.
Like a face covered with tears which the wind dries,
The air is full of the shuddering of things which flee,
And man is tired of writing and woman of loving.

Houses here and there began to send up smoke.
Prostitutes, with white eyelids,
And opened mouths, slept their stupid sleep;
Impoverished women, dragging their thin old breasts,
Blew on their burning logs and blew on their fingers.
It was the hour when in the cold and stinginess
The pain of women in labor grows greater;
Like a sob interrupted by thick blood
The distant song of the cock ripped through the foggy
air;
A sea of fogs bathed the buildings,
And teh dying in the depths of the hospitals
Utttered their last rattle in uneven gasps.
The revelers went home, broken by their work.

Shivering dawn in a rose-and-green dress
Slowly advanced over the deserted Seine,
And dark Paris, rubbing his eyes,
Took hold of his tools, a hard-working old man.