"Love...
It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
In silence and alone
To seek the elected one."* Wadsworth Longfellow
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forgive me, Henry,
for tampering with thy perfect,
these words provoke
a restless, hard earned, smouldering and enflaming,
imperfected, unasked, unsought,
yearning
to explain, share, complete, abbreviate, lengthen and explicate,
my version, my coloration,
my coronation,*
from the end of ceaseless, repetitive waves of wanting
completion
forty years in the desert,
four hundred year in ******* in Egyptian exile,
boul
der chained, uphill climber,
amazes me even now, how
did I desire to breathe,
arose to contemplate, perplexed,
why was I placed on this star,
skin branded dissatisfied, a human being,
unratified, unconstituted
just another love song, just another poem,
certainly no better, and surely worse,
than the thousands of thousands that preceded,
and the thousand more that will come by
nightfall
surrender - I cannot surpass
what lies below
acknowledge respectfully,
the luckless, the loveless
despair can dissipate, as hard to believe,
as hard as the unendurable, I counsel not
hard patience,
instead,
awake forever impatient, irresolutely
hardy and ravenous,
for what will come your way,
when I cannot say,
but this I know,
you are an elected, selected one, and
It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
In silence and alone
To seek the elected one
8:21am Aug. 27, 2016
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Endymion (by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
The rising moon has hid the stars;
Her level rays, like golden bars,
Lie on the landscape green,
With shadows brown between.
And silver white the river gleams,
As if Diana, in her dreams,
Had dropt her silver bow
Upon the meadows low.
On such a tranquil night as this,
She woke Endymion with a kiss,
When, sleeping in the grove,
He dreamed not of her love.
Like Dian’s kiss, unasked, unsought,
Love gives itself, but is not bought;
Her voice, nor sound betrays
Its deep, impassioned gaze.
It comes,—the beautiful, the free,
The crown of all humanity,—
In silence and alone
To seek the elected one.
It lifts the boughs, whose shadows deep,
Are Life’s oblivion, the soul’s sleep,
And kisses the closed eyes
Of him, who slumbering lies.
O, weary hearts! O, slumbering eyes!
O, drooping souls, whose destinies
Are fraught with fear and pain,
Ye shall be loved again!
No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.
Responds,—as if with unseen wings,
A breath from heaven had touched its strings
And whispers, in its song,
“Where hast though stayed so long!”