Sigh Away
Your silence weeps upon the floor,
the day is crawling slowly;
I hear it through my shuttered door
and I am rendered lowly.
We never think in times of joy
that this could be our ending;
the game becomes transparent ploy
when angels are descending.
Sigh, sigh, sigh away;
sigh for the loss of a better day.
Words are breath, on winds they fly,
and a word is just an everlasting sigh.
Your silence like a wedding veil
across your face is playing;
it wafts like mist, transparent-pale,
and tangles every saying.
The darkened clouds in heaven's sky
like widow's gauze are forming;
the sun, no matter what we try,
is covered by their storming.
Sigh, sigh, sigh away;
the world will end no matter what we say.
Spirit is sigh and a dying flame;
our love's spirit will die the same.
The Desert Sands
The desert sands are stretching bare and far,
as silent as the fear of haunted waste,
like carpets heavy-dusted by the wind
that stirs up sandy clouds in rushing haste;
half-hid, like sunken treasures in the sea,
a ruin goes to wreck with pillars dressed
by centuries in dusty dirt and sand
and days on days uncounted and unblessed.
Where once a festive party sang their songs
with all the solemn light of laughter's care,
where once the lovers kissed in shadows' guard,
now all is waste and trace in desert bare.
The carven image, once a sign of pride,
is vested with the tapestry of woe;
around the place decay and desert rule,
with none who care, and none who love and know.
O let me laugh a while! The time to mourn
extends with endless years that weep with dust;
all things will pass and end, though stone their make,
foundations one day fail, and all our trust.
The Venture
The thought that thinks itself,
to which all thinking tends,
is nearly reached when seeking faith
a light to pathway lends.
Beneath a sky of void,
more black and sure than night,
the mind wends long and careful way
by nothing but star's light.
All science and all art
from surmise take their start,
to know for you have surely heard
and keep it in your heart.
Like sailor brave and bold,
the stars alone to guide,
the mind sets out with hoping faith
to reach another side.
It seeks and so will find,
though storms lie in the way,
and finds, if it on path abides,
the shores of glory's day.
Leontodon
The dandelion some call a weed;
it does not care
but laughs in gold and wafts its seed
and leaps and dances everywhere.
The lion's tooth will spring with joy
in tribe that no one can destroy.
Perhaps this verse is leaping up,
a wild endive on the green,
with morning dew on bloom and cup
that gives its simple face a sheen;
in swift disorder horse-bloom grows
but smiles and hosts its dancing shows.
