Two Love Poems

BLESSED

I have been blessed by the stillness of your eyes,
The jagged edges of my heart smoothed,
Calmed, the ancient fray long fought.
No balm so sure, nor touch as sweetly healing
As the unconscious kiss of your eyes,
Their ingenuous power.
Even through the fallow procession of years
Bereft of you in voice and flesh,
Still I am not forsaken;
The remembrance of that exquisite stillness,
Like the strains of a Chopin nocturne,
Whispers through my whirring thoughts.
Once again, you heal me;
Once more, I am blessed.

The following sonnet, about unprofessed love, was inspired by this passage in E. H. Young's novel The Misses Mallet:

'But after all,' Charles said more clearly, 'it doesn't matter about being acclaimed. It's just like making music for deaf people: the music's there; the music's there. And so it doesn't matter very much whether you love me. It's one's weakness that wants that, one's loneliness. I can love you just the same, perhaps better; it's the audience that spoils things. I should think it does!'

 CONSTANCY

Nessun amore più vero di quello che muore non rivelato. - Old Italian proverb *

My music sounds, though there is none to hear.
What does it signify, the empty space
it fills? My sounds make this a sacred place.
There could not be a more attentive ear,
nor one more sympathetic, than the chair
that sits so priest-like there, while down the glass
fall contrite tears of one more autumn passed:
another season, and another year.
My music sounds within these hallowed walls;
it vibrates in the darkened corners, falls
upon the empty shelves and empty tabletops.
Around this lonely space its blessings flow,
absolving all my dead, unrealized hopes
whose ashes I had scattered long ago.

* No truer love than that which dies unrevealed.


Poems © Leticia Austria 2007, 2008
"Blessed" first published in Decanto
"Constancy" first published in Dreamcatcher