i never saw a moor,
i never saw the sea;
yet know i how the heather looks,
and what a wave must be.
i never spoke with God,
nor visited in heaven;
yet certain am i of the spot
as if the chart were given.
if i can stop one heart from breaking,
i shall not live in vain;
if i can ease one life the aching,
or cool one pain,
or help one fainting robin
unto his nest again,
i shall not live in vain.
i'm nobody! who are you?
are you nobody, too?
then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
they'd banish us, you know.
how dreary to be somebody!
how public like a frog
to tell your name the livelong day
to an admiring bog.
when i die, i want your hands on my eyes:
i want the light and weight of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
i want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
i want you to live while i wait for you, asleep.
i want your ears still to hear the wind, i want you
to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walked on.
i want what i love to continue to live,
and you whom i love and fancy above everything else
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:
so that you can reach everything my love directs you to.
so that my shadow can travel along your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.
i can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
write, for instance: "the night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."
the night wind whirls in the sky and sings.
i can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
i loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
on nights like this, i held her in my arms.
i kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.
she loved me, sometimes i loved her.
how could i not have loved her large, still eyes?
i can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
to think i don't have her. to feel that i've lost her.
to hear the immense night, more immense without her.
and the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.
what does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
the night is full of stars and she is not with me.
that's all. far away, someone sings. far away.
my soul is lost without her.
as if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
my heart searches for her and she is not with me.
the same night that whitens the same trees.
we, we who were, we are the same no longer.
i no longer love her, true, but how much i loved her.
my voice searched the wind to touch her ear.
someone else's. she will be someone else's. as she once
belonged to my kisses.
her voice, her light body. her infinite eyes.
i no longer love her, true, but perhaps i love her.
love is so short and oblivion so long.
because on nights like this i held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.
although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem i write for her.