Oh! why will you not let me love you...

Oh! why will you not let me love you

Well enough?

You have plucked my blossoms,

Gathered the leaves

And revived them with water;

But all the tortuous roots

Delving for your spirit

In subterranean passions

With a blind unresting desire,

Have you felt them, have you known?

In the blackest night of sleep

Though I be sunk a thousand fathoms

In the cerulean depths of slow oblivion,

My soul still swims toward you

Against the envious pressure of the tide....

You who are so tired, so filled with sleep

That you would brush a rose-leaf from your cheek

Lest its heaviness should stir your rest,

How can you shoulder the weight of my great burden

That is too vast for me to bear alone?

I tell you

Love is no little thing,

No moth-winged Cupid painted on the air,

No thin flute music petaling the silence

As leaves that flutter from a cherry tree.

It is the thought that broods upon its death,

The dread of mountains looking to the storm

Ere shrieks of lightning cleave their breasts in twain.

It is the fire that pillars up the stars

To mix its flame with their eternal gold.

Oh, listen to me!

You shall hear my message sung from sphere to sphere

As star-dust pouring a path through Heaven.

You shall know me

In the pensive shadows of trees,

In the luminary phantoms

Reflected in the stillness of a lake;

In the arrows of sunlight shot through meshing leaves

And quivering in the moss;

In the abandoned play of breakers

Showering their crystals to the moon;

In the folly of rainbow dolphins.

I only ask of you

To be the diver in my deepest pool,

To bring from out its blue obscurity

The things my life has moulded unaware,

Treasures my passion and my hunger fashioned

In loneliness of prayer unlit by life,

Created out of nothing save myself

Within the blind fast silence of the soul.