II. To You These Children Sing

The golden barge of Le Dauphin,
Full of wine soaked voices and graceful music,
Floated gently past the Île de Fou.
Revelers, laughing gaily in powdered wigs, clambered onto the deck,
As the jeweled ship glided past the fetid prison.
Ignoring the cries of the prisoners, left in cells to drown as the guards fled,
Ignoring the sound of the muddy waves lapping,
Ignoring the song of the mad ones singing:

Il y a maladie dans le Roi,
Il y a maladie dans le terre et sur l’eaux ¹

A crowd of dehydrated, starving people,
Moved forward slowly across the bridge
The skin on their faces rippling
From the wind whipped by the blades of a chopper,

“Go back!” screamed a red-faced man “You people ain’t comin’ in here!”

Struggling backward, guns were fired above their heads,
A man and a woman, clutching together, fell to the pavement,
Unable to move, they were trampled by the frightened crowd.

At the feet of a policeman, lay the dead lovers, tangled together,
Twins born too soon, washed up by a blood tide and left stranded on this miserable shore.

“te chantent ces enfants”
“Change nos lots, crible les fléaux” ²

---

Notes:

"Le Dauphin"
Le Dauphin is a title that referred to the heir apparent to the throne of France under the Valois and Bourbon dynasties.

"Isle de Fou"
Island of the Mad. I made this place up, as far as I know it doesn’t exist.

"prisoners, left in cells to drown as the guards fled"
Prisoners from the Orleans Parish prison were left locked in their cells to drown as the prison guards fled. Here's the story.

¹ “There is sickness in the King; there is sickness in the land and upon the waters”
Tom Pratt

"A crowd...moved...across the bridge"
The confrontation on the bridge refers to the Mayor of Gretna who had his police block a major evacuation route from New Orleans in order to keep thousands of evacuees out of his town. Warning shots were fired over the heads of the crowd but no one was killed: “Two Americas One Bridge”

"At the feet of a policeman, lay the dead lovers..."
The young couple dying by being trampled to death on the bridge are fictional. They are the characters that appear again as the Angels Cassiel and Anahita in Part III and they are the ones being buried in the Jazz Funeral of Part IV.

² “To you these children sing, change our lots, confound the plagues”
Rimbaud – “A Une Raison (To A Reason)” from Illuminations p.39