In Love For Long
I've been in love for
With what I cannot
And will contrive a
For the
That has no mould or shape,
From which there's no escape.
It is not even a name,
Yet is all constancy;
Tried or untried, the same,
It cannot part from me;
A breath, yet as
As the established hill.
It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss.
How can I ever
What it is I love?
This happy happy
Is sieged with crying sorrows,
Crushed beneath and
Between todays and morrows;
A little
Held in the world's vice.
And there it is
And careless as a child,
And in
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world's day long.
This love a moment
For what I do not
And in a moment
Is like the happy
That keeps its perfect
Between the tiger's
And vindicates its cause.
Edwin Muir
Other author posts
The Killing
That was the day they killed the Son of On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem Zion was bare, her children from their Sucked by the dream of
The Animals
They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place
Scotlands Winter
Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill, The sun looks from the Helmed in his winter casket, And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky
Scotland 1941
We were a tribe, a family, a people Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field, And all may read the folio of our fable, Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield