A Perfect Example

Steve Toth

I’m a perfect example
of the kind of person I am
An utter idiot
looking endlessly into your eyes
We want to ride together some waves of delight
but our bubbles pop & we’re shooting stars
There’s a moment of feeling ridiculous
Our love is a light we like to leave on
I love you as you love me
& you don’t find that scary

Is that a warmth or a tingling
making its way slowly up your spine?
I feel something in you matching the chill
crawling up mine
Love has ripped our realities open again
Every cell in my body has free will
that’s how I come to love you so freely
It’s the sympathetic magic
of ordinary things coming together
to become extraordinary

We’re involved in ways we can’t imagine
I have no idea for instance
what’s flowing in a flower besides water
or making a bird cry
out its name until we start calling it that
We become the breath of life
inhaling lifetimes of wounded desire
What were we just talking about?
I’m always talking about you
no matter what the words say

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Leaves

By Sara Teasdale

One by one, like leaves from a tree,
All my faiths have forsaken me;
But the stars above my head
Burn in white and delicate red,
And beneath my feet the earth
Brings the sturdy grass to birth.
I who was content to be
But a silken-singing tree,
But a rustle of delight
In the wistful heart of night–
I have lost the leaves that knew
Touch of rain and weight of dew.
Blinded by a leafy crown
I looked neither up nor down–
But the little leaves that die
Have left me room to see the sky;
Now for the first time I know
Stars above and earth below.

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Lord of My Life

By Rabindranath Tagore

Thou who art the innermost Spirit of my being,
art thou pleased, Lord of my Life?
For I give to thee my cup filled with all
the pain and delight that the crushed
grapes of my heart had surrendered,
I wove with rhythm of colors and song cover for thy bed,
And with the molten gold of my desires
I fashioned playthings for thy passing hours.
I know not why thou chosest me for thy partner,
Lord of my life.

Didst thou store my days and nights,
my deeds and dreams for the alchemy of thy art,
and string in the chain of thy music my songs of autumn and spring,
and gather the flowers from my mature moments for thy crown?

I see thine eyes gazing at the dark of my heart,
Lord of my life,
I wonder if my failure and wrongs are forgiven.
For many were my days without service
and nights of forgetfulness; futile were the flowers
that faded in the shade not offered to thee.

Often the tied strings of my lute slackened
at the strains of thy tunes.
And often at the ruin of wasted hours
my desolate evenings were filled with tears.

But have my days come to their end at last,
Lord of my life, while my arms round thee
grow limp, my kisses losing their truth?
Then break up the meeting of this languid day!*
Renew the old in me in fresh forms of delight;
and let the wedding come once again in
a new ceremony of life.

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Sudden Light

By Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,–
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turn’d so,
Some veil did fall,–I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our love restore
In death’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

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Bird Raptures

By Christina Rossetti

The sunrise wakes the lark to sing,
The moonrise wakes the nightingale.
Come darkness, moonrise, everything
That is so silent, sweet, and pale,
Come, so ye wake the nightingale.

Make haste to mount, thou wistful moon,
Make haste to wake the nightingale:
Let silence set the world in tune
To hearken to that wordless tale
Which warbles from the nightingale.

O herald skylark, stay thy flight
One moment, for a nightingale
Floods us with sorrow and delight.
To-morrow thou shalt hoist the sail;
Leave us to-night the nightingale.

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Thou Walkest With Me

 

Mathilde Blind

THOU walkest with me as the spirit-light
Of the hushed moon, high o’er a snowy hill,
Walks with the houseless traveller all the night,
When trees are tongueless and when mute the rill.
Moon of my soul, O phantasm of delight,
Thou walkest with me still.

The vestal flame of quenchless memory burns
In my soul’s sanctuary. Yea, still for thee
My bitter heart hath yearned, as moonward yearns
Each separate wave-pulse of the clamorous sea:
My Moon of love, to whom for ever turns
The life that aches through me.