***

The smile in your verses

Like a jocular Alice of the Deep Seas 

Discoursing with melancholy, far gone

Mad hatters

Flowed from a restless, seeking heart

That beat between the lines

Growing tired of ageing 

This heart forever courted 

Its prime

Defiant of limits

The years' weight would impose

You died young, loving, timeless

And gazing at the stars

Not winter claimed you 

But the warmth

Of the rising Canadian summer

Sweet and accommodating the sky

That offered itself to your vision

Tall the firs, stout the acorn trees,

Soft the rivers

A breeze from far Brittany

Grazed your heart like a sailor's song's

Echo

And of all these you were

And to all these you return 

When you closed your eyes, resting 

From the rich gold of the day

The Celtic soul's 

Soft-spoken fierceness,

Its art and passion, silver-wrought,

Its ornamented iron

Cast you in its Orphean mould

Whose breath is poetry 

You lived it, friend

And knew no other 

That poetry which was your life

Your life which was that poetry

Has reached completeness

Made of fractures 

And these are united again

Beneath this smiling heaven

Now

And its arms are stretched out 

To embrace you

As it embraces everything 

In everything that reached its fullness

To be absorbed in compassion 

Which renders everything whole 

In Regis Auffray I lost one of my most faithful collaborators, whose work was an important inspiration to my own. He was one of the people to whom my writings were addressed. For over twenty years he was a curious, eager and ever-appreciative audience to every text I produced in these decades, whose reception and advice was an invaluable measuring scale. We shared joy and social analysis, nostalgia and the sanguine melancholia that lies at the bottom of every creative spirit.

As a writer and as a man, he possessed all these qualities, articulated in the quirky brilliance of verses and lines in which laughter and tears breathed side by side. He was able to write with the true artist's seeming ease and in this way produce works of a unique, inimitable quality, to which I too was a faithful and appreciative audience. His rich and extensive oeuvre comprises many definitive works which are here to stay and which, I can say without the slightest doubt, will last forever. 

They are a source of pleasure and thought, expressive of fundamental human truths and emotions that will remain topical and relevant as long as humans live, breathe, think, reflect and feel. 

It is time, therefore, that a definitive edition of his collected works be compiled. 

His passing leaves a gap in my life that can never be filled, and I dare say that it is the same for many of us, as it is for countless students whose careers and academic ethos he helped to shape. 

Our prayers, our love and our praise accompany his soul, embarking now on the path of completion. 

In eternal presen

ce, rest on peace! 

Muhammad A. Al Mahdi, June 28, 2025