Lady

Lady, you have taken my life.
The new sun that dawns this day
is not mine, nor the moon silvering
in the long evening, these things now
idle to my mind seeing you there
by the window.

And you speak of love and its labyrinth,
the possibilites, the wonderings,
the callings, our faces blent as is the soul.
But you have ire in your eye, the bold
friend of three years gone, taken

as you take, now, my life, the passage
of a history drawn until there is nothing
left but the casing of something once wonderful
that married itself into our favours.
Now, alone, I can weep, but it does not help:

you are gone and the stars have left their
heaven.  Then night and then again night
in which fever strikes, a blind passion
of reason that holds nothing in, giving
nothing out as it once did, my face lost,

the whole world somewhere else.
Lady, you have taken my life.
Now the fire of morning will end.
Now the frost of evening will end.
Now the blue of the sky will end.

And all the while I shall speak your name
divine, as though given by a gentle God
who smiles, and having smiled walks away
to somewhere new forgetting our circumstance
that will not shift, here, Lady, at the dead of night

my love given without question, without answer,
the wild blossom of truth coming like
a heart atack that does nothing
but hide the truth as I watch your shadow
emptying the door,

the trail of contentment gone, the eye
of Zeus cast down watching terrible favours
that do nothing, my own eye blind
as the room deserts, the many petaled bloom
of magnolias festering in moonlight

singing of pleasure lost, never knowing
where to end except here, our mouths
unstitched, the battled crown
of our beings tainted as if
many years past,

this the calling of a death-head.

John Cornwall

If you've any comments on his poem, John Cornwall would be pleased to hear from you.