If I could write the beauty of your eye,
The simple goodness of how you treated me;
Our descendants would turn and swear I lie:
That such unconsidered kindness could ever be.
*
Some plead their love and look for recompense;
And your beauty truly glows a light as well,
If I’m decrepit in my tenderness
I still speak true of you with what I tell.
*
When that churl death with dust my bones shall cover,
Th’ angelic force you embody late and soon,
I come not with passion as an earthly lover,
But in light that comes from far beyond the moon.
*
When I am gone you’ll know I loved you true,
Not with anguished desperation of the hour,
Not with lust and avarice as most men do:
But with trust, and honesty, and power.
*
*
(C) 2015 by William G. Milne
*
*
*
I’m pulling these poems out of my notebooks. None of us know
how long we have to live. And some of these fragments are worth
passing on. I was working with various rhythms. And slowly but
surely I became more and more fascinated with iambic pentameter.
(*Something that maybe only magicians know – different
voices come through with different rhythms.)
*
I was working on writing
a book with Shakespeare’s verses – inserting a verse or two of my own
while I was at it, experimenting with shorter lines to compensate for the shorter attention span of the television age. Some of the poems worked out well.
(I just noticed a line of Shakespeare in this present poem.) There’s
no way I’m likely to think of a line with the phrase “that churl death” in it.
So let’s give Willie the Shake his due. Of course Willie stole a whole lot of lines himself! And T.S. Eliot, as he says, stole even more: “Lesser poets
borrow, great poets steal.”
So there’s no way I’m going to apologize in the slightest for any lines that happen to appear.
Also, as I grow older, I seem to be completely losing my memory.
Maybe it’s the drugs they give me. Maybe it’s the drugs I gave myself.
So any kind of an apology whatsoever is fast becoming an impossibility.
*
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