My love, I have tried with all my being
to grasp a form comparable to thine own,
but nothing seems worthy;
I know now why Shakespeare could not
compare his love to a summer’s day.
It would be a crime to denounce the beauty
of such a creature as thee,
to simply cast away the precision
God had placed in forging you.
Each facet of your being
whether it physical or spiritual
is an ensnarement
from which there is no release.
But I do not wish release.
I wish to stay entrapped forever.
With you for all eternity.
Our hearts, always as one.
ONE WISH
If I could have just one wish,
I would wish to wake up everyday
to the sound of your breath on my neck,
the warmth of your lips on my cheek,
the touch of your fingers on my skin,
and the feel of your heart beating with mine...
Knowing that I could never find that feeling
with anyone other than you.
What I Love About You
I love the way you look at me,
Your eyes so bright and blue.
I love the way you kiss me,
Your lips so soft and smooth.
I love the way you make me so happy,
And the ways you show you care.
I love the way you say, "I Love You,"
And the way you're always there.
I love the way you touch me,
Always sending chills down my spine.
I love that you are with me,
And glad that you are mine.
MY LIFE
A gentle word like a spark of light,
Illuminates my soul
And as each sound goes deeper,
It's YOU that makes me whole
There is no corner, no dark place,
YOUR LOVE cannot fill
And if the world starts causing waves,
It's your devotion that makes them still
And yes you always speak to me,
In sweet honesty and truth
Your caring heart keeps out the rain,
YOUR LOVE, the ultimate roof
So thank you my Love for being there,
For supporting me, my life
I'll do the same for you, you know,
My Beautiful, Darling Wife.
A STRANGER
A stranger you were once.
Then, with a gentle look you took my hand.
As our lives engaged,
you lit my life and I held both your hands.
Now that decades have passed,
ours souls have indeed become one.
How fortunate we are
that we have found the love so true
that everyone dreams about.
THE JEWEL
You're my man, my mighty king,
And I'm the jewel in your crown,
You're the sun so hot and bright,
I'm your light-rays shining down,
You're the sky so vast and blue,
And I'm the white clouds in your chest,
I'm a river clean and pure,
Who in your ocean finds her rest,
You're the mountain huge and high,
I'm the valley green and wide,
You're the body firm and strong,
And I'm a rib bone on your side,
You're an eagle flying high,
I'm your feathers light and brown,
You're my man, my king of kings,
And I'm the jewel in your crown.
Never Have I Fallen
Your lips speak soft sweetness
Your touch a cool caress
I am lost in your magic
My heart beats within your chest
I think of you each morning
And dream of you each night
I think of your arms being around me
And cannot express my delight
Never have I fallen
But I am quickly on my way
You hold a heart in your hands
That has never before been given away
Your Name
I wrote your name in the sky,
but the wind blew it away.
I wrote your name in the sand,
but the waves washed it away.
I wrote your name in my heart,
and forever it will stay.
Love Is ...
Love is the greatest feeling,
Love is like a play,
Love is what I feel for you,
Each and every day,
Love is like a smile,
Love is like a song,
Love is a great emotion,
That keeps us going strong,
I love you with my heart,
My body and my soul,
I love the way I keep loving,
Like a love I can't control,
So remember when your eyes meet mine,
I love you with all my heart,
And I have poured my entire soul into you,
Right from the very start.
I Will Love You Forever
I love you so deeply,
I love you so much,
I love the sound of your voice
And the way that we touch.
I love your warm smile
And your kind, thoughtful way,
The joy that you bring
To my life every day.
I love you today
As I have from the start,
And I'll love you forever
With all of my heart.
When i'm with you
When I'm with you,
eternity is a step away,
my love continues to grow,
with each passing day.
This treasure of love,
I cherish within my soul,
how much I love you...
you'll never really know.
You bring a joy to my heart,
I've never felt before,
with each touch of your hand,
I love you more and more.
Whenever we say goodbye,
whenever we part,
know I hold you dearly,
deep inside my heart.
So these seven words,
I pray you hold true,
"Forever And Always,
I Will Love You.
TRUE LOVE
True love is a sacred flame
That burns eternally,
And none can dim its special glow
Or change its destiny!
True love speaks in tender tones
And hears with gentle ear,
True love gives with open heart
And conquers all fear.
True love makes no harsh demands
It neither rules nor binds,
And true love holds with gentle hands
The hearts that it entwines.
Petals
Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.
Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.
I humbly appraise my mother's worth,
It began with pain to give me birth,
Which triggered off a love so strong,
Blossoming into a life-long bond.
When needed, she was always there,
Someone I realised would always care.
And the older I got the more I knew,
A mother's love sincere and true.
Now as I watch Mum age in years,
I'm happy to help and ease her fears.
Privileged now to play my part,
As she did for me from the very start.
A Birthday
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hand it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
Wild Nights
Wild nights. Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port
Done with the compass
Done with the chart.
Rowing in Eden.
Ah, the sea.
Might I but moor
Tonight with thee!
Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes
First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.
And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.
Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer's dividing water,
and slip inside.
You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.
The complexity of women's undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.
Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything -
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.
What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.
So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset
and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that reason is a plank,
that life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.
A White Rose
The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.
But I send you a cream-white rosebud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.
Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art
Bright star, would I were steadfast 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 steadfast, 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.
Love rules the court,
The camp, the grove,
And men below, and the saints above,
For love is heaven
and heaven is love.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies:
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Jenny Kissed Me
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as man can breath, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I Wanna Be Yours
I wanna be your vacuum cleaner
Breathing in your dust,
I wanna be your Ford Cortina
I will never rust,
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
Song: To Celia
Drink to me, only with thine eyes
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove's nectar sup
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be
But thou thereon didst only breath
And sent'st it back to me:
Since, when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
True Love
True love is a sacred flame
That burns eternally,
And none can dim its special glow
Or change its destiny!
True love speaks in tender tones
And hears with gentle ear,
True love gives with open heart
And conquers all fear.
True love makes no harsh demands
It neither rules nor binds,
And true love holds with gentle hands
The hearts that it entwines.
DEEP IN LOVE
Deep in love
cheek leaning on cheek we talked
of whatever cane to our minds
just as it came
slowly oh
slowly
with our arms twined
tightly around us
and the houses passed and we
did not know it
still talking when
the night was gone
cheek leaning on cheek we talked
of whatever cane to our minds
just as it came
slowly oh
slowly
with our arms twined
tightly around us
and the houses passed and we
did not know it
still talking when
the night was gone
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you.
There was a time when
life was bright and young and blooming,
and your sorrow was much more than
any other pain.
Your beauty gave the spring everlasting youth:
your eyes, yes your eyes were everything,
all else was vain.
While you were mine, I thought, the world was mine.
Though now I know that it was not reality,
that’s the way I imagined it to be;
for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
and other pleasures, tool
Woven in silk and satin and brocade,
those dark and brutal curses of countless centuries:
bodies bathed in blood, smeared with dust,
sold from market-place to market-place,
bodies risen from the cauldron of disease,
pus dripping from their festering sores—
my eyes must also turn to these.
You’re beautiful still, my love,
but I am helpless too;
for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
and other pleasures too.
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you!
that love I once had for you.
There was a time when
life was bright and young and blooming,
and your sorrow was much more than
any other pain.
Your beauty gave the spring everlasting youth:
your eyes, yes your eyes were everything,
all else was vain.
While you were mine, I thought, the world was mine.
Though now I know that it was not reality,
that’s the way I imagined it to be;
for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
and other pleasures, tool
Woven in silk and satin and brocade,
those dark and brutal curses of countless centuries:
bodies bathed in blood, smeared with dust,
sold from market-place to market-place,
bodies risen from the cauldron of disease,
pus dripping from their festering sores—
my eyes must also turn to these.
You’re beautiful still, my love,
but I am helpless too;
for there are other sorrows in the world than love,
and other pleasures too.
Do not ask of me, my love,
that love I once had for you!
I can't resist adding one more little poem (translated by W. S. Merwin and J. Moussaieff Masson). It shows how all lovers have quarreled--and made up with redoubled passion--since time immemorial. The spat commemorated here took place in Sanskrit fifteen hundred years ago.
IN THEIR QUARREL
In their quarrel she
pretended to be
asleep until he
shaking with passion
started to take off her dress
thief she said laughing and
boldly she bit
his lower lip
pretended to be
asleep until he
shaking with passion
started to take off her dress
thief she said laughing and
boldly she bit
his lower lip
If (as I hope) you like my selections, you will be delighted to know that the power of Indian Love Poems is cumulative. Start at page one and read straight through and you will be dizzy with.....love, of course.
I need to warn you of the possibility that I am not bringing total objectivity to this review. The volume does contain one poem translated by me, from Urdu, by Fahmida Riaz, who’s still writing poetry in Pakistan. It’s called “Deep Kiss” and it begins: “Deep myrrh-scented kiss, deep with the tongue, suffused with the musky perfume of the wine of love....”
And to return to the question of what to give your valentine:Indian Love Poems along with the chocolates and roses would bereally nice! With a kiss. For starters anyway.
