Let the Cicadas Remove
Let the cicadas remove the stress from your shoulders
that you may become younger as you grow older;
let the birds in the blueness take wing on the wind,
rising up from the glory and descending again.
By the pond where the turtles in gentleness play,
breaking the surface with up-peeking head,
let sleep come to take you in breeze and in cool.
Cast off the ire of the lands of the day,
walk in the gardens of the realms of the dead
by the ripples and waves of a mirroring pool.
Plaint
My heart, my life, my queen and soaring star,
now hear my prayer and place no bar,
but grant me mercy for my endless love;
I love you well, my rose, my grace, my dove!
From urgent need turn not your eye away,
but miracle endow as piously I pray,
and grant me cheer, and joy, and all good thing,
that I may in your honor rise to sing!
But, ah! most cruel beloved one divine,
though truly you have claimed that you are mine,
yet you deny, deny, deny, my every wish,
as though you were as cold as ocean-fish.
How cruel you are, unyielding in your ways,
and taking joy from all my summer days!
It seems that when I beg, you have but laughed,
and I have then been charged for overdraft.
The dollars in the book seem far too low,
though I have saved and saved, and this you know;
O empty bank account, my sweet, my pet,
refill your empty heart and heal my debt!
Duel
My foe was wise in dark and ancient art,
and so I learned that strange and eldritch way,
a witch's brew from stormy-shadowed heart
when madness rules and thought begins to fray;
I cast a curse upon his evil deeds,
a horror formed of death and hate and time;
I cast it like a sower casts his seeds,
a nightmare-gift of malice grown sublime,
and doom I brought upon his kind and race,
a torment like to hell and like to shame;
I cast a pox and plague upon his face
and malice like a devil on his name.
For long we cast enchantments back and forth
that burned like raging flame and froze like ice
from ageless sea of white in arctic north,
and oft my cunning mind sought new device,
but greatest of them all was endless death
that flowed around and through him like the sea;
and then I rasped my last and mortal breath.
At last I found my foe and he found me,
for in a mirror hostile, filled with woe,
reflected back at me, his face I know.
