One day writing will become too difficult.
translated from the French by Youmna Chamieh
We will no longer be able to think (breathe, words like silence)
Of the very complicated nature of what it is to live.
The poem will be, more and more blind, nothing but words:
No one will be able to truly hear them.
Something else will come in the ruins of time and friendship,
It won’t even be worth saying that we must die,
We will die.
Un jour écrire deviendra trop difficile.
On ne pourra plus penser (respirer, les mots comme du silence)
À la trop grande complication de ce que c’est vivre.
Le poème sera, de plus en plus aveugle, plus rien que des mots :
Personne qui pourra les entendre pour de vrai.
Quelque chose d’autre viendra dans des ruines de temps et d’amitié,
Ce sera même pas la peine de dire qu’il faut mourir,
On mourra.
Copyright © 2025 by James Sacré. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 15, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I first encountered this poem in a 2018 reissue of [Sacré’s book] Écrire pour t’aimer ; à S.B. [To write is to love you, to S.B.], a beautiful book originally published in 1984. What moved me most was its clarity about what poetry can and cannot hold onto—the way it gestures toward encounters already doomed to vanish through death, yet insists on speaking to their importance anyway. There is no illusion here that a poem can defeat death. The words that may wish to retain something of life are merely a tomb—one that will eventually be forgotten. Still, the poem says, writing is an act of the living; that’s why it carries within it the knowledge of an inevitable end. That paradox is what stayed with me. We live inside it always, whether or not we name it; and ‘Un jour écrire deviendra trop difficile’ stretches that awareness across time, giving shape to an otherwise wordless burden.”
—Youmna Chamieh
James Sacré
