Three Poems: Lovers, Beauty, Liberation, Transient Constancy & Poetry

Desire - From The Love Poems Of Rumi

A lover knows only humility,
he has no choice.
He steals into your alley at night,
he has no choice.
He longs to kiss every lock of your hair,
don't fret, he has no choice.
In his frenzied love for you,
he longs to break the chains of his imprisonment,
he has no choice.

A lover asked his beloved:
Do you love yourself more than you love me?
Beloved replied: I've died to myself and I live for you.
I've disappeared from myself and my attributes,
I am present only for you.
I've forgotten all my learnings,
but from knowing you I have become a scholar.
I have lost all my strength,
but from your power I am able.

I love myself ... I love you.
I love you ... I love myself.

I am your lover, come to my side,
I will open the gate to your love.
Come settle with me, let us be neighbours to the stars.
You have been hiding so long,
endlessly drifting in the sea of my love.
Even so, you have always been connected to me.
Concealed, revealed, in the unknown, in the un-manifest.
I am life itself.

You have been a prisoner of a little pond,
I am the ocean and its turbulent flood.
Come merge with me,
leave this world of ignorance.
Be with me, I will open the gate to your love.

I desire you more than food or drink.
My body, my senses, my mind, hunger for your taste.
I can sense your presence in my heart
although you belong to all the world
I wait with silent passion for one gesture,
one glance from you.


*More on Verschwiegene Liebe (Silent Love), see here...

Lyrics from a poem by Josef Karl Benedikt von Eichendorff (1788-1857).

Over treetops and cornfields, and into the splendour – Who may guess at them, who could overtake them? Thoughts float away. Night keeps her secrets. Thoughts are free. If only she could guess, who has been thinking of her, by the rustling of the grove, when no one was awake. Save the clouds flying past – My love keeps its secret, and is beautiful as the night.

Über Wipfel und Saaten
In den Glanz hinein -
Wer mag sie erraten,
Wer holte sie ein?
Gedanken sich wiegen,
Die Nacht ist verschwiegen,
Gedanken sind frei.

Errät es nur eine,
Wer an sie gedacht
Beim Rauschen der Haine,
Wenn niemand mehr wacht
Als die Wolken, die fliegen -
Mein Lieb ist verschwiegen
Und schön wie die Nacht.

(Also listen to my beloved lyric baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's beautiful rendition of Verschwiegene Liebe here.)

*     *     *

One Woman to All Women
by D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

I don't care whether I am beautiful to you
You other women.
Nothing of me that you see is my own;
A man balances, bone unto bone
Balances, everything thrown
In the scale, you other women.

You may look and say to yourselves, I do
Not show like the rest.
My face may not please you, nor my stature; yet if you knew
How happy I am, how my heart in the wind rings true
Like a bell that is chiming, each stroke as a stroke falls due,
You other women:

You would draw your mirror towards you, you would wish
To be different.
There's the beauty you cannot see, myself and him
Balanced in glorious equilibrium,
The swinging beauty of equilibrium,
You other women.

There's this other beauty, the way of the stars
You straggling women.
If you knew how I swerve in peace, in the equi-poise
With the man, if you knew how my flesh enjoys
The swinging bliss no shattering ever destroys
You other women:

You would envy me, you would think me wonderful
Beyond compare;
You would weep to be lapsing on such harmony
As carries me, you would wonder aloud that he
Who is so strange should correspond with me everywhere.

You see he is different, he is dangerous,
Without pity or love.
And yet how his separate being liberates me
And gives me peace! You cannot see
How the stars are moving in surety
Exquisite, high above.

We move without knowing, we sleep, and we travel on,
You other women.
And this is beauty to me, to be lifted and gone
In a motion human inhuman, two and one
Encompassed, and many reduced to none,
You other women.



*     *     *

The Art Of Poetry
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness--such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there's a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.


Arte Poética
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Mirar el río hecho de tiempo y agua
y recordar que el tiempo es otro río,
saber que nos perdemos como el río
y que los rostros pasan como el agua.

Sentir que la vigilia es otro sueño
que sueña no soñar y que la muerte
que teme nuestra carne es esa muerte
de cada noche, que se llama sueño.

Ver en el día o en el año un símbolo
de los días del hombre y de sus años,
convertir el ultraje de los años
en una música, en un rumor y un símbolo,

Ver en la muerte el sueño, en el ocaso
un triste oro, tal es la poesía
que es inmortal y pobre. La poesía
vuelve como la aurora y el ocaso.

A veces en las tarde una cara
nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo;
el arte debe ser como ese espejo
que nos revela nuestra propia cara.

Cuentan que Ulises, arto de prodigios,
lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca
verde y humilde. El arte es esa Itaca
de verde eternidad, no de prodigios.

También es como el río interminable
que pasa y queda y es cristal de un mismo
Heráclito inconstante, que es el mismo
y es otro, como el río interminable.