love poems

These are love poems by Michael R. Burch. Some are poems about love in desert places where Bedouins have learned to do without. The poems include everything from heroic couplets, sonnets and villanelles, to free verse and haiku. 

Sonnet: Once (a confirmed bachelor recants)

for Beth

Once when her kisses were fire incarnate
and left in their imprint bright lipstick, and flame,
when her breath rose and fell over smoldering dunes,
leaving me listlessly sighing her name ...

These are erotic poems and risque love poems by Michael R. Burch.

Retro
by Michael R. Burch
Now, once again,
love’s a redundant pleasure,
as we laugh
at my childish fumblings
through the acres of your dress,
past your wily-wired brassiere,
through your panties’ pink billows
of thrill-piqued frills ...

Till I lay once again—panting redfaced
at your gayest lack of resistance,
and, later, at your milktongued
mewlings in the dark ...

For thousands of years
   The Hudson River’s flowed
Today I see
   A pleasure boat stowed
September day
   With net-like, wet-washed gray
I think of her
   A thousand miles away

Red as a peach with a smile on her face,
Face with a smile as a peach in her place.
Willow that hangs and shakes its drapery low,
Low is the willow that hangs as wind does flow.
Waves the blossom as wind and hair entwine,
Entwines the hair and wind, this blossom of mine.
Roams the road as the moon sinks west,
West sinks the moon where the road roams best.
 
 
After “Reckless Spirit” (Barbarian Bodhisattva) by Liu Dao (1511-1598)
 

Here we go with poem number two,

Away in southern lands the red beans lay
As spring returns to send its blooms above;
Desiring you I pluck a big bouquet,
To hold a thing that marks our tender love.
 
 
 
Chinese
 
相思
 
紅豆生南國，
春來發幾枝。
願君多采擷，
此物最相思。
 
 
Pronunciation
 
Xiāng Sī
 
Hóng dòu shēng nán guó，
Chūn lái fā jī zhī。
Yuàn jūn duō cǎi xié，
Cǐ wù zuì xiāng sī。
 
 
Literal Character Translation
 

My voice is broken, wounded of thirst.
Alone in the valley of silent echoes,
I lie behind a wall, immersed
And torn between the clashing shadows.
 
My voice is broken, wounded of thirst.
I sear through the metal of your skin,
Immense in the timeless night and cursed,
Disturbed in the chains that wear me thin.
 
My voice is broken, wounded of thirst.
The fire that melts this stone to glass
Turns liquid like a wave, submersed
In the choral song of love’s last mass.
 
My voice is broken, wounded of thirst.

The smoky mist is wide and deep,
The wind’s a child awake from sleep;
A mother bear with baby cubs,
I watch in love through tangled shrubs.
 
Now wandering, I chase the clouds
Up here, away from city crowds,
But still I think of you that day,
Your eyes a lake, the moon at play.

A fern surrounds my life like a hollow maze
In the intricate lattice of love’s first gaze;
Following a pattern that guides me on this road
I reach for her lips beneath the mistletoe.
 
My love comes forth with the apple of desire,
A tangled taste that takes a life to acquire;
Magic and nightshade in a mandrake stew,
I drink the nighttime herbs in a witch’s brew.
 
Seared in my skin like a tattoo of her name,
My cry has faded to a touch without shame;
Pulled by a thread that stains the earth and sky

She said it was a trial,
That I’d hear but wouldn’t know—
In this world I’m not a master,
So it’s silly for me to crow.
My ego brought on disaster:
She loathed me, I never knew;
So now I lie only with my dear—Denial.
 
 
The end rhyme scheme follows Frances Darwin Cornford’s poem, “The True Evil.”