Ghazal 98

The wind last night brought wind of my far-traveled love to me.
I, too, will give the wind my heart and what must be shall be.

It’s come to this: no confidante will hear my secrets save
Lightning at dusk and wind at dawn as I live ardently.

In your curls’ locks, not once did my defenseless heart recall
The home in me it left behind, but shunned the memory.

Today I treasure all advice of friends who warned of love.
Blessed are the advisers, Lord, for it is they who see.

Memory of you was my heart’s blood when wind came to unwind
The cord that closed the rosebud’s robe beneath our meadow tree.

My winded body felt death blow till a new dawn wind blew
Fresh hope for our reunion and returned my life to me.


Hafiz! Your amicable way has earned you what you yearn for.
Let every soul be sold to help a man of amity.


- Hafiz

I go back to may 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

- Sharon Olds

Canst thou, O cruel! say I love thee not,
When I against myself with thee partake?
Do I not think on thee, when I forgot
Am of myself, all tyrant, for thy sake?
Who hateth thee that I do call my friend?
On whom frown'st thou that I do fawn upon?
Nay, if thou lour'st on me, do I not spend
Revenge upon myself with present moan?
What merit do I in myself respect,
That is so proud thy service to despise,
When all my best doth worship thy defect,
Commanded by the motion of thine eyes?
But, love, hate on, for now I know thy mind;
Those that can see thou lovest, and I am blind.

-William Shakespeare

Those lips that Love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate'
To me that languish'd for her sake;
But when she saw my woeful state
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
'I hate' she alter'd with an end,
That follow'd it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away;
'I hate' from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying 'not you.

- William Shakespeare


This sonnet is unique in the collection, because it is written in iambic tetrameter, instead of pentameter. Because of this it is said to either be one of the earliest works of Shakespeare or not his work at all.

G. Blakemore Evans has said: "[Sonnet] 145 has proved an embarrassment to critics and editors. . . .A playful, neatly turned trifle, 145 conveys no sense of serious emotional involvement or complication, and the richly ambivalent associative language we commonly find in Shakespeare's sonnets is notably absent.”

Personally I don’t care if Shakespeare himself wrote it, history claims it as his and I love it. Read it out loud, let the words flow and you’ll love it too.

Once more: Lord Byron

Adiue, adieu! my native shore

Adieu, adieu! my native shore
Fades o'ver the waters blue;
The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,
And shrieks the wild sea-mew.
Yon sun that sets upon the sea
We follow in his flight;
Farewell awhile to him and thee,
My native Land-Good Night!
A few short hours, and he will rise
To give the morrow birth;
And I shall hail the main and skies,
But not my mother earth.
Deserted is my own good hall,
Its hearth is desolate;
Wild weeds are gathering on the wall;
My dog howls at the gate.

- Lord George Gordon Byron

A Lord Byron day

And Wilt thou weep when I am low?

And wilt thou weep when I am low?
Sweet lady! speak those words again:
Yet if they grieve thee, say not so--
I would not give that bosom pain.

My heart is sad, my hopes are gone,
My blood runs coldly through my breast;
And when I perish, thou alone
Wilt sigh above my place of rest.

And yet, methinks, a gleam of peace
Doth through my cloud of anguish shine:
And for a while my sorrows cease,
To know thy heart hath felt for mine.

Oh lady! blessd be that tear--
It falls for one who cannot weep;
Such precious drops are doubly dear
To those whose eyes no tear may steep.

Sweet lady! once my heart was warm
With every feeling soft as thine;
But Beauty's self hath ceased to charm
A wretch created to repine.

Yet wilt thou weep when I am low?
Sweet lady! speak those words again:
Yet if they grieve thee, say not so--
I would not give that bosom pain.

- Lord George Gordon Byron

A Riddle

The beginning of eternity, the end of time and space,
The beginning of every end, and the end of every place.

- Lord George Gordon Byron


(special shoutout to @AftonVolturiFIT, he was the first one to get it right, the riddle is about the letter 'E')

Poem for Leah Clearwater

YOU left me, sweet, two legacies, -
A legacy of love
A Heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea,
Between eternity and time,
Your consciousness and me.

- Emily Dickinson


(A present for my sister who RP's as Leah Clearwater. She will understand this poem)