THE KISS

Give me, my love, that billing kiss
 I thaught you one delicious night,
When, turning epicures in bliss,
 We tried inventions of delight.

Come, gently steal my lips along,
 And let your lips in murmurs move,-
Ah, no!-again- that kiss was wrong-
 How can you be so dull, my love?

'Cease,cease!' the blushing girl replied-
  And in her milky arms she caught me-
'How can you thus your pupil chide;
 You know 'twas in the dark you taught me!'

-Thomas Moore

April Aubade

Worship this world of watercolor mood
in glass pagodas hung with veils of green
where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood
and sap ascends the steeple of the vein.

A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals
to waken dreamers in the milky dawn,
while tulips bow like a college of cardinals
before that papal paragon, the sun.

Christened in a spindrift of snowdrop stars,
where on pink-fluted feet the pigeons pass
and jonquils sprout like solomon's metaphors,
my love and I go garlanded with grass.

Again we are deluded and infer
that somehow we are younger than we were.

-Sylvia Plath

UNDER ONE SMALL STAR

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.

Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.

May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.

I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.

Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.

Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a spoonful of water. 

And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,

your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,

forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.

My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

Truth, please don't pay me much attention.

Dignity, please be magnanimous.

Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.

Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.

My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere at once.

My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and each man.

I know I won't be justified as long as I live,

since I myself stand in my own way.

Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light. 

-Wislawa Szymborska

FALLING FROM THE SKY

Magic is dying out, although the heights 

still pulse with its vast force. On August nights

you can't be sure what's falling from the sky:

a star? or something else that still belongs on high?

Is making wishes an old-fashioned blunder

if heaven only knows what we are under?

Above our modern heads the dark's still dark,

but can't some twinkle in it explain: ''I'm a spark,

I swear, a flash that a comet shook loose

from its tail, just a bit of cosmic rubble;

it's not me falling in tomorrow's news,

that's some other spark nearby, having engine trouble.''

-Wislawa Szymborska