Une clavicule de Lièvre

Pour ma grande dame Freyja, qui m’a prise sous son aile il y a peu.

Illustration: Jillian Tamaki

The Collar Bone of a Hare

Would I could cast a sail on the water
Where many a king has gone
And many a king’s daughter,
And alight at the comely trees and the lawn,
The playing upon pipes and the dancing,
And learn that the best thing is
To change my loves while dancing
And pay but a kiss for a kiss.

I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare
Worn thin by the lapping of water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.

W.B Yeats

Curieusement ce poème me fait vraiment penser à un truc que j’avais lu il y a longtemps , un extrait des confessions d’Isobel Gowdie, une jeune femme écossaise accusée de sorcellerie au XVeme siècle, qui affirmait pouvoir se transformer en lièvre à l’aide de la formule suivante:

I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again.

Elle redevenait ensuite humaine grâce a une autre formule que voici:

Hare, hare, God send thee care.
I am in a hare’s likeness now,
But I shall be in a woman’s likeness even now.