  If you loved me ever so little, I could bear the bonds that gall, I could dream the bonds were brittle; You do not love me at all. O beautiful lips, O bosom More white than the moon's and warm, A sterile, a ruinous blossom Is blown your way in a storm. As the lost white feverish limbs Of the Lesbian Sappho, adrift In foam where the sea-weed swims, Swam loose for the streams to lift, My heart swims blind in a sea That stuns me; swims to and fro, And gathers to windward and lee Lamentation, and mourning, and woe. A broken, an emptied boat, Sea saps it, winds blow apart, Sick and adrift and afloat, The barren waif of a heart. Where, when the gods would be cruel, Do they go for a torture? where Plant thorns, set pain like a jewel? Ah, not in the flesh, not there! The racks of earth and the rods Are weak as foam on the sands; In the heart is the prey for gods, Who crucify hearts, not hands. Mere pangs corrode and consume, Dead when life dies in the brain; In the infinite spirit is room For the pulse of an infinite pain. I wish you were dead, my dear; I would give you, had I to give Some death too bitter to fear; It is better to die than live. I wish you were stricken of thunder And burnt with a bright flame through, Consumed and cloven in sunder, I dead at your feet like you. If I could but know after all, I might cease to hunger and ache, Though your heart were ever so small, If it were not a stone or a snake. You are crueller, you that we love, Than hatred, hunger, or death; You have eyes and breasts like a dove, And you kill men's hearts with a breath As plague in a poisonous city Insults and exults on her dead, So you, when pallid for pity Comes love, and fawns to be fed. As a tame beast writhes and wheedles, He fawns to be fed with wiles; You carve him a cross of needles, And whet them sharp as your smiles. He is patient of thorn and whip, He is dumb under axe or dart; You suck with a sleepy red lip The wet red wounds in his heart. You thrill as his pulses dwindle, You brighten and warm as he bleeds, With insatiable eyes that kindle And insatiable mouth that feeds. Your hands nailed love to the tree, You stript him, scourged him with rods, And drowned him deep in the sea That hides the dead and their gods. And for all this, die will he not; There is no man sees him but I; You came and went and forgot; I hope he will some day die. |
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