One
When I speak
to you,
my chest is
the bank of some
well-travelled river,
where they come
to sing, the poets,
those ones who,
we learn, dealt
with love and verse
as if they were
weighing life
and death.
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Two
Your voice
wakes the
bird in its cage
inside my ribs
and without
hesitation,
it spouts a verse
about rain
on
hills
waiting to
sprout.
Three
Your absence, to me,
beloved,
is like that king’s question to
the wise ones.
He turned love-play, and love
and romance, into a riddle
that had to be
unlocked by a turn
of words.
He asked about one thing,
but was in fact asking
about something
else.
He asked, that king,
of a bee, flying thither
hither, can you say,
if women’s hair
– his face still bearing the
artful fragrances
of the queen’s black-as-bees
tresses –
had a natural intoxicating
smell.
And since bee language
was beyond him,
he repeated this doubt,
artificed into verse,
to the wise ones.
To me, this verse asks
the only question
that lovers –
no matter whether they talk
of this or that,
or of nothing –
ever ask: Are you really mine?
Can you really be mine?
Four
Those noble ones, they knew
how the absence of one
of two lovers
could change everything
to nothing.
So they said,
when she cannot come to
meet him:
no stars, no moon, no sun
or rain-clouds in the sky.
No sky
Five
She dreamed of the
meeting with him –
even the colours on the
forest trees under which
he would wait.
But it was not to be –
she could not leave home.
They tell us the wind was
strong that night;
and the next morning,
the lily-pond...