Gypsies on a Journey

The people of the tribe, with fierce, prophetic eyes
Set forward yesterday, their offspring carried tight
Upon their backs, or feeding each cub’s appetite
From hanging breasts, the ever-ready, liquid prize.
Beneath their gleaming weaponry, on foot, men go
Alongside caravans where theirs are huddled, skies
They walk across with laziness and heavy eyes
From absentee mirages filling them with woe.
The cricket, from the bottom of its sandy spring,
Observes them passing by, and starts again to sing;
Cybele, who loves them, pads with green their course,
Makes the desert bloom and shifts the rock aside
Before these travelers, for whom is opened wide
The future darkness from an all-familiar force.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. He is perhaps best known for his book of lyric poetry Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil).

Jennifer Reeser‘s sixth poetry collection, Indigenous, was recently awarded “Best Poetry Book of 2019” by Englewood Review of Books. Her website is jenniferreeser.com.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”