- Non-Erotic Poetry
- A Lover's Wish
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Click hereWere I to write my love upon your skin
With silver nib, a gift of midnight blue
To goddesses of old, like a tattoo,
Or carve the words in stone, I would not win.
I cannot mark you mine: the spinning threads -
Their web speaks louder than the seal of gold
That binds your life, forever keeps your soul
Tied to another, as my sadness spreads.
And yet you are still mine, to love and woo
And cosset, if I could; perhaps I'll send
You words on swallows' wings, or caws of crows.
I wish to leave behind my love for you
In this rued world, that hundred years would spend
And not dissolve the spell your love now throws.
- COMMENTS
This is lovely, Mer. It had a real Elizabeth Barret Browning ring to it. I read it yesterday but didn't have the time to delve into it.
My only quibble is with line 3. The iambic pentameter felt forced to me. To my ear "like a" gives an unintended stress to "like," a supposedly unstressed word and diminishes the stressed word "a," which is difficult to stress anyway. The comma you inserted mitigates, but it still sounds off to me.
"as a" perhaps isn't much better, but it elides and doesn't further diminish the stress in "a," at least to my ear. There may be a different word pairing, such as "a love tattoo," but that felt a bit forced to me as well.
That said, I repeat it's a lovely poem.
Beautiful in its realization of the impossibility of freedom from love's spell, but still wishing for it (in the last 3 lines).
8+6 is a very musical division for me and the iambic pentameter enhances it further still. The melody is already sounding in my head, so I keep it for having a go (if you don't mind, of course).
Well done!