love poems

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.”
 
 

Many years ago, this day,
As lingering clouds
Brought out the morning rays,
I heard the east wind drown
In the sound of the ocean spray.
 
She came in nightly
On a foaming swell,
Lady floating lightly
On a seaborne shell.
 
“Oh bury me not
In the deep blue sea;
Oh bury me not
Where the cold wind flees.”
 
I carried her home
For miles and miles . . .
If only I’d known
It was just for a while.
 
The words unsaid, undone—
Gone before our time had run.