The volatile world of matter flows
Over our senses, jarringly, confusedly,
Or sweetly, gently; its melodies transpose
Incessantly, scarcely do we sense them flee
But back they flood in anguished throes –
Or coupled in an unheard harmony!
Our thoughts, upon an immaterial stream,
Rush though our inner wildernesses,
Placid, foaming, dark, or swift agleam,
From one now fluently the next fluoresces:
One single, grand, interminable theme
Which to its close-veiled end progresses.
The one, downward and turbidly descending,
The other striving upward to the sheer
And secret spring of its own rare depending;
They meet in us over some unmapped frontier
Where light is but a vague and spectral blending;
Two several-purposed worlds within one sphere.
Here – just before the day’s first effulging;
Here – inferior airs translate to aether;
Here – where a thought is first divulging,
Causing a power in the world to stir:
Here – by some grace’s awesome will indulging,
Reason bids the unforeseen occur!
Here is the poet’s paradise, the wide
And open garden of the mind’s delight,
Fruited to never sate nor to subside;
But fail you will to breach it with your sight;
It is a cloistered place, forever denied
To those who clasp the earthen over tight.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Always the Same (2010)
The months must pass, the seasons come and go,
The years succeed themselves with breathless haste,
As all things bend to life’s inconstant flow;
Our very world is made to grow and waste.
And so it is with passion and desire –
Brief winds that rouse the heart and pass away,
Brief winds that turn an ember into fire,
A self-consuming blaze, doomed to decay.
But love, I’ve learnt, obeys a different law,
Eternal and unchanging, always the same,
And ever to its object kneels in awe,
Kept warm by its sacred, self-renewing flame.
And so it is I sing my love for you
With poems always the same and always new.
The years succeed themselves with breathless haste,
As all things bend to life’s inconstant flow;
Our very world is made to grow and waste.
And so it is with passion and desire –
Brief winds that rouse the heart and pass away,
Brief winds that turn an ember into fire,
A self-consuming blaze, doomed to decay.
But love, I’ve learnt, obeys a different law,
Eternal and unchanging, always the same,
And ever to its object kneels in awe,
Kept warm by its sacred, self-renewing flame.
And so it is I sing my love for you
With poems always the same and always new.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Second Chances, for my friend, Jim Khuu
I loved her, and I let her slip away,
The woman of my dreams, who loved me too;
I couldn’t find the words to really say
I loved her, and I let her slip away.
Now here we are again, and come what may
I’ll tell her what I knew and know is true:
I love her, and won’t let her slip away!
This woman of my dreams, who loves me too.
The woman of my dreams, who loved me too;
I couldn’t find the words to really say
I loved her, and I let her slip away.
Now here we are again, and come what may
I’ll tell her what I knew and know is true:
I love her, and won’t let her slip away!
This woman of my dreams, who loves me too.
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