Poems

They say the moon is far,

that you must look up to find it.

I only ever have to look beside me,

and there you are —

chaand sii, and closer.

Your name arrives like weather:

soft first, then everywhere,

and I have stopped carrying an umbrella

because I would rather be

completely, endlessly caught in it.

At two in the morning

the world runs out of noise,

and what is left is a small sound —

you, breathing,

the quietest proof I have of luck.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day's

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,

In life after life, in age after age forever.

My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms

In life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,

Its ancient tale of being apart or together,

As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount

At the heart of time love of one for another.

We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same

Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell —

Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,

The love of all man's days both past and forever:

Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,

The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours —

And the songs of every poet past and forever.

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night

And watching, with eternal lids apart,

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,

The moving waters at their priestlike task

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

That Love is all there is,

Is all we know of Love;

It is enough, the freight should be

Proportioned to the groove.

I am he that aches with amorous love;

Does the earth gravitate? Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?

So the body of me to all I meet or know.

A thousand desires, each worth dying for—

many of them I have realized, and yet I yearn for more.

We have heard about the exile of Adam from the Garden,

but with far greater humiliation I left the street on which you live.

Oh tyrant, of your true nature I could not remain unaware—

if the sword did not fall on our necks, at least the promise remained.

Now go and take a look at Ghalib's letters, my dear friend—

so many of my nights were lit, only by writing your name.

I did not know a word could be a house

until I put your name against mine

and watched them turn into a doorway.

Mynchal —

shelter with a light left on,

the sound the key makes

when you come home.