love poetry

After a long night of interrogation,
followed by a thirty-minute trial,
there was no doubt about it: I was guilty.

So with my teeth tucked in my bleeding mouth,
and with my jaw now wired tightly shut,
a guard named Peter met me at the gate.

Looking different than I had imagined,
he smiled and kicked me point blank in the balls,
then led me like a drunkard down the stairs.

The long dark corridor seemed like a tunnel,
one with no light to mitigate the end,
only a special cell the saint made clear

I have found out a gift for my fair;
I know where the fossils abound,
Where the footprints of Aves declare
The birds that once walked on the ground.
Oh, come, and--in technical speech--
We'll walk this Devonian shore,
Or on some Silurian beach
We'll wander, my love, evermore.

I will show thee the sinuous track
By the slow-moving Annelid made,
Or the Trilobite that, farther back,
In the old Potsdam sandstone was laid;
Thou shalt see, in his Jurassic tomb,
The Plesiosaurus embalmed;

He sits in a chair
Whose fourth leg’s his.
He loves this chair.
They used to make love in it.
That was when the chair
Had four plus two plus two,
Eight legs. Days with legs.
Since then there’s been a lot of walking out.
Now the chair’s short of a leg
And he’s lending his.

I came to your town, my love,
   And you were away, away!
I said "She is with the Queen's maidens:
   They tarry long at their play.
They are stringing her words like pearls
To throw to the dukes and earls."
   But O, the pity!
I had but a morn of windy red
To come to the town where you were bred,
   And you were away, away!

I came to your town, my love,
   And you were away, away!
I said, "She is with the mountain elves
   And misty and fair as they.

Loving looks the large-eyed cow,
Loving stares the long-eared ass
At Heaven's glory in the grass!
Child, with added human birth
Come to bring the child of earth
Glad repentance, tearful mirth,
And a seat beside the hearth
At the Father's knee-
Make us peaceful as thy cow;
Make us patient as thine ass;
Make us quiet as thou art now;
Make us strong as thou wilt be.
Make us always know and see
We are his as well as thou.

1.
LORD, I do choose the higher than my will.
I would be handled by thy nursing arms
After thy will, not my infant alarms.
Hurt me thou wilt-but then more loving still,
If more can be and less, in love's perfect zone!
My fancy shrinks from least of all thy harms,
But do thy will with me-I am thine own.

2.

Some things wilt thou not one day turn to dreams?
Some dreams wilt thou not one day turn to fact?
The thing that painful, more than should be, seems,
Shall not thy sliding years with them retract-

Who know thee, love: thy life be such
That, ere the year be o'er,
Each one who loves thee now so much,
Even God, may love thee more!

Two knights rode forth at early dawn
A-seeking maids to wed,
Said one, "My lady must be fair,
With gold hair on her head."

Then spake the other knight-at-arms:
"I care not for her face,
But she I love must be a dove
For purity and grace."

And each knight blew upon his horn
And went his separate way,
And each knight found a lady-love
Before the fall of day.

But she was brown who should have had
The shining yellow hair --
I ween the knights forgot their words

Let it not your wonder move,
Less your laughter, that I love.
Though I now write fifty years,
I have had, and have, my peers;
Poets, though divine, are men,
Some have lov'd as old again.
And it is not always face,
Clothes, or fortune, gives the grace;
Or the feature, or the youth.
But the language and the truth,
With the ardour and the passion,
Gives the lover weight and fashion.
If you then will read the story,
First prepare you to be sorry
That you never knew till now

To meet, to know, to love--and then to part,
Is the sad tale of many a human heart.