When the songbird sings

Dark Sonnet
Neil Gaiman

I don’t think that I’ve been in love as such
although I liked a few folk pretty well
Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch
for brave men died and empires rose and fell
for love, girls follow boys to foreign lands
and men have followed women into hell
In plays and poems someone understands
there’s something makes us more than blood and bone
And more than biological demands
for me love’s like the wind unseen, unknown
I see the trees are bending where it’s been
I know that it leaves wreckage where it’s blown
I really don’t know what I love you means
I think it means don’t leave me here alone

Photo by Silly Woman {little bug}

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question “Whither?”

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

— Robert Frost

YOU WHO NEVER ARRIVED

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,-
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening…

–Ranier Maria Rilke
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)