The Poet asks his Love to write

                    Visceral love, living death,

                    in vain, I wait your written word,

                    and consider, with the flower that withers,

                    I wish to lose you, if I have to live without self.

                    The air is undying: the inert rock

                    neither knows shadow, nor evades it.

                    And the heart, inside, has no use

                    for the honeyed frost the moon pours.

                    But I endured you: ripped open my veins,

                    a tiger, a dove, over your waist,

                    in a duel of teeth and lilies.

                    So fill my madness with speech,

                    or let me live in my calm

                    night of the soul, darkened for ever.

— Federico Garcia Lorca

‘Du bist mein und bist so zierlich,’

You’re mine and so dainty,

You’re mine and so mannerly,

Yet still though you lack something:

You kiss now with such pointed lips,

Like a dove, when drinking it sips:

You’re really too dainty a thing.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

O so dear

O so dear from far and near and white all

So deliciously you, Méry, that I dream

Of what impossibly flows, of some rare balm

Over some flower-vase of darkened crystal.

Do you know it, yes! For me, for years, here,

Forever, your dazzling smile prolongs

The one rose with its perfect summer gone

Into times past, yet then on into the future.

My heart that sometimes at night tries to confer,

Or name you most tender with whatever last word

Rejoices in that which whispers none but sister –

Were it not, such short tresses so great a treasure,

That you teach me a sweetness, quite other,

Soft through the kiss murmured only in your hair.

— Stephane Mallarme 

Another Day