A seed blown from no-one knew where,
a new flower in the shelter of her green chamber
dressed herself slowly with four thorns:
“Let the tigers come with their claws,”
she said, on the verge of naïve untruth.
Her inseparable grace
filled my heart with pity/
the little prince believed
he would never want to return,
“Goodbye,” he said to the flower
{who} made no answer but,
“I am a flower.”
The secret was revealed abruptly
far from his rose when
he arrived on our planet,
a sheep eats anything it finds in reach
and the flowers believe
their thorns terrible weapons,
‘is the warfare between the sheep
and the flowers unimportant,’ he demanded?
all the little prince’s stars darkened
choked by his sobbing,
rarely a mountain changes position,
an ocean empties itself of waters,
but, the flower is in danger
of speedy disappearance.”
My flower is ephemeral,”
said the little prince to me
and went away thinking
of the sheep back home
he’d left tied to a small post.
Walking for a time upon a road
led to a garden all abloom with roses;
they all looked like his flower/
the universe obliged to pretend
a flower, unique in all the world
was a common rose.
He continued on,
climbing a high mountain
to see the whole planet
at one glance
sharpened like needles.
“Who are you?,” asked the little prince.
“I am all alone,” answered
the pointed echo.
A fox found him some time later
sitting near an apple tree
who wanted only to be tamed:
the fox said, “Listen.
Be very patient and observe
the proper rites too often neglected,
sit in the grass and say nothing
for words are misunderstandings,
and sit a little closer every day . . .
“The little prince drew near the fox,
a fox like one thousand other foxes
so that they could become unique
in all the world to each other.
“One only understands the things
one tames,” said the fox.
And the little prince thought of the baobobs
specifically the catastrophe of them
being trees as big as castles
like the heart is seized
with the desire to awaken
and bores clear through with roots
being too small, like the planet
of the baobobs, splits in pieces.
And though he had found friendship
he still thought of a single rose
on a planet he no longer
knew a way back to.
Though the stars are beautiful
because of a flower
that cannot be seen
though a desert beautiful
that somewhere
it hides a well,
though, a sheep is in a box
in his drawings for her,
still the little prince yearned;
all-the-while true that all
stars in the sky were
now abloom, thinking her
on any one of them…
to those who do not know,
confidence in the snake,
a little lonely in the desert,
can carry a person further
than a ship. The little prince
understood this very well
when thinking of his flower.
The story of the little prince ended
when he said to me, “I am going home,”
rushing headlong into an abyss.
“My star can be found above where
I came to the earth. Just like it is
with a flower that lives on a star
that all the stars are abloom for me,
my star will be somewhere there,
and you alone will have stars
that laugh,” he told me,
to be content to have been known.
There is nothing more fragile
on all the earth than
the little prince with
eyes closed,
him extinguished by a wind,
a weathervane the wind
has forgotten.
Men raise five thousand roses
and do not find what they are looking for
in one single rose like him and I,
and do not wonder,
has the sheep eaten a flower.
Erasure of, The Little Prince by Antoine de-Saint Exupery
-for my most beloved friend, John Zajac.
In Due Proportion 