Accept, dear girl, this little token, And if between the lines you seek, You’ll find the love I’ve often spoken The love my dying lips shall speak. Our little ones are making merry O’er am’rous ditties rhymed in jest, But in these words (though awkward very) The genuine article’s expressed.Read More →
My love is like to ice, and I to fire: How come it then that this her cold is so great Is not dissolved through my so hot desire, But harder grows the more I her entreat? Or how comes it that my exceeding heat Is not allayed by herRead More →
Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory — Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed; And so thy thoughts when thou are gone, Love itself shall slumber on. ~ Percy ByssheRead More →
Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder: the edge of the forest, the edge of the desert the unpainted stairs at the back where we squat outside, eating popcorn the edge of the receding glacier where painfully and with wonder at havingRead More →
So many poetry anthologies feel proud for going back to the 1800s or 1600s. This compilation, The Ink Dark Moon – Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani, reminds us that love and passion are completely timeless. It features the stunningRead More →
I know a sweet suburban girl, She’s witty, bright and brief; With dimples in her cheeks; and pearl In rubies set, for teeth. Beneath her glossy raven hair There beams the hazel eye, Bright as the star of evening there Where the yellow sunbeams die. Her breath is like aRead More →
Escape me? Never— Beloved! While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue. My life is a fault at last, I fear— It seems too much like aRead More →
Hey, rose, just born Twin to a thorn; Was’t so with you, O Love and Scorn? Sweet eyes that smiled, Now wet and wild: O Eye and Tear- mother and child. Well: Love and Pain Be kinfolks twain; Yet would, Oh would I could Love again. ~ Sidney Lanier (1842-1881)Read More →
The beauty and challenge of Japanese poetry, for those of us who do not read Japanese, is that we are reliant on the translator to accurately portray those beautiful words and sounds in a way which makes sense in our own language. Sometimes this can be incredibly challenging. The exactRead More →
Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care; But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair. So sang a little Clod of Clay, Trodden with the cattle’s feet; But a Pebble of the brook, Warbled out these metres meet: Love seekethRead More →
