1247 Love poems

The hardness of her heart and truth of mine When the all-seeing eyes of heaven did see,

Asleep until noon, I'm dreaming we've been granted another year. You're here with me, healthy. Then, half-awake, the half-truth— this is our last day. Life's leaking away again, and this time, we know it. Dear body, I told you, pleading, Don't Leave! but I understand you can't say anything. Who are we? Are we fictional? We don't look like our pictures, don't look like anyone I know. Daylight flickers through a bamboo grove, we approach the Forbidden City, Looking together for the Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes. Time is the treasure, you tell me, and the past is its hiding place. I instruct our fictional children, The past is the treasure, time is its hiding place. If we told him how much we love him, how much we miss him, he could stay.

Time only cause of my unrest By whom I hop’d once to bee blest How cruell art thou turned? That first gav’st lyfe unto my love, And still a pleasure nott to move Or change though ever burned; Have I thee slack’d, or left undun One loving rite, and soe have wunn Thy rage or bitter changing? That now noe minutes I shall see, Wherein I may least happy bee Thy favors soe estranging. Blame thy self, and nott my folly, Time gave time butt to bee holly; True love such ends best loveth Unworhty love doth seeke for ends A worthy love butt worth pretends Nor other thoughts itt proveth: Then stay thy swiftnes cruell time, And lett mee once more blessed clime To joy, that I may prayse thee: Lett mee pleasure sweetly tasting Joy in love, and faith nott wasting And on fames wings I’le rayse thee: Never shall thy glory dying Bee untill thine owne untying That time noe longer liveth; T’is a gaine such tyme to lend: Since soe thy fame shall never end Butt joy for what she giveth.

on a day when we were dark and not so full of light we met what did we find? nothing. everything, when we closed our eyes which anyway had never been open. once, we thought we loved each other who can reverse time? we tried. we stepped out of space into some new step of distance and fell— and not in love.

Once you said joking slyly,If I’m killed I’ll come to haunt your solemn bed, I’ll stand and glower at the head And see if my place is empty still, or filled.

I need more time, a simple day in Paris hotels and window shopping. The croissants will not bake themselves and the Tower of London would Like to spend a night in the tropics with gray sassy paint. It has many Wounds and historic serial dreams under contract to Hollywood. Who will play the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, and who will braid her Hair? Was it she who left her lips on the block for the executioner, Whose hands would never find ablution, who would never touch a woman Again or eat the flesh of a red animal? Blood pudding would repulse him Until joining Anne. That is the way of history written for Marlow and Shakespear. They are with us now that we are sober and wiser, Not taking the horrors of poetry too seriously. Why am I telling you this Nonsense, when I have never seen you sip your coffee or tea, In the morning? Not to mention, Never heard you sing, although some claim it is quite grand. Will you teach me to sing like Chaliapin? Will I impress you with my Cartoon Russian accent? I like sour cream and borsht; We went to school together. My minor was caviar and blinis. This is what it means to listen to Boris Godunov late at night. Cool mornings are for Lakmé and songs of flowers for misplaced lovers. But why should we speak in a foreign language to each other, We are not birds. I have other stories too strange and beautiful to be Told. They have no sound or memory. They will rest on your lips when You bring your hands to your mouth to stop their gush of air against your Face. We should go back and meet again at the street fair of cufflinks. Our hearts teach us how to fly with wings of pain. That is the price of the disarticulated lessons we should not abstain from Playing. The accumulated misdemeanors add up to the most egregious Felony: ignoring the demands of the heart. We remain in abeyance to The muses who are only interested in their outcomes, We are just the worms on their hooks of selfishness. What do they care, we are not Greek. We are just a dream of pleasant Comic arias that suffice as whims in the morning. We are small enemies to them with strange large hearts that control the Weather in the heavens. They cannot change or unteach us not to Trespass their quarters of endowment. Perhaps, after all, you are an Affable spirit bubbling over with your own deductions to minimize the Pointed dots in your beautiful endeavors. Although I feel like a bird with a broken wing, Each day I think of you I fumble an attempt to fly to impress you with The color of my paper wings.

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow, Though thou be black as night And she made all of light, Yet follow thy fair sun unhappy shadow. Follow her whose light thy light depriveth, Though here thou liv’st disgraced, And she in heaven is placed, Yet follow her whose light the world reviveth. Follow those pure beams whose beauty burneth, That so have scorched thee, As thou still black must be, Till Her kind beams thy black to brightness turneth. Follow her while yet her glory shineth, There comes a luckless night, That will dim all her light, And this the black unhappy shade divineth. Follow still since so thy fates ordained, The Sun must have his shade, Till both at once do fade, The Sun still proved, the shadow still disdained. Poetry Out Loud Note : In the print anthology, this poem is titled "Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow." The student may give either title during the recitation.

The Oldest Love Poem (For Susan) Back from Istanbul, she gives to me the photograph she took inside the Archaeological Museum’s blue tiled hush, of a tablet carved in terra cotta from Nippur, written in Sumerian. Delicate etches, a lift of riverbed where the summer waters ran glistened on this piece of earth the earnest working hand, a pause between the lines to contemplate cedars’ ornate overhanging leaf-work become inseparable from the carving.  Maybe reading sky, reading wind, or tree sounds beside the sound of clay shaped to carry a human mark. Maybe it says we are so elegant in our exchange that looking at each other the trees whisper their contented green across any distance to be here branches heat-satiated full in our veins of holding

When love was a question, the message arrived in the beak of a wire and plaster bird. The coloratura was hardly to be believed. For flight, it took three stagehands: two on the pulleys and one on the flute. And you thought fancy rained like grace. Our fog machine lost in the Parcel Post, we improvised with smoke. The heroine dies of tuberculosis after all. Remorse and the raw night air: any plausible tenor might cough. The passions, I take my clues from an obvious source, may be less like climatic events than we conventionalize, though I’ve heard of tornadoes that break the second-best glassware and leave everything else untouched. There’s a finer conviction than seamlessness elicits: the Greeks knew a god by the clanking behind his descent. The heart, poor pump, protests till you’d think it’s rusted past redemption, but there’s tuning in these counterweights, celebration’s assembled voice.

My dear, it was a moment to clutch at for a moment so that you may believe in it and believing is the act of love, I think, even in the telling, wherever it went. In the false New England forest where the misplanted Norwegian trees refused to root, their thick synthetic roots barging out of the dirt to work on the air, we held hands and walked on our knees. Actually, there was no one there. For forty years this experimental woodland grew, shaft by shaft in perfect rows where its stub branches held and its spokes fell. It was a place of parallel trees, their lives filed out in exile where we walked too alien to know our sameness and how our sameness survives. Outside of us the village cars followed the white line we had carefully walked two nights before toward our single beds. We lay halfway up an ugly hill and if we fell it was here in the woods where the woods were caught in their dying and you held me well. And now I must dream the forest whole and your sweet hands, not once as frozen as those stopped trees, nor ruled, nor pale, nor leaving mine. Today, in my house, I see our house, its pillars a dim basement of men holding up their foreign ground for you and me. My dear, it was a time, butchered from time that we must tell of quickly before we lose the sound of our own mouths calling mine, mine, mine.