Haiku for Ha – (Senryu-Tanka) September 29, 2014

Being inspired … there’s many ways to be inspired to write haiku or anything else as far as that goes.  Today I’m reading Heeding Haiku with Ha … who has given his public a wonderful poem by George Gordon Byron to inspire his readers:

I Speak Not, I Trace Not, I Breathe Not Thy Name

I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name;
There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame;
But the tear that now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart.
Too brief for our passion, too long for our peace,
Were those hours – can their joy or their bitterness cease?
We repent, we abjure, we will break from our chain, –
We will part, we will fly to – unite it again!
Oh! thine be the gladness, and mine be the guilt!
Forgive me, adored one! – forsake if thou wilt;
But the heart which is thine shall expire undebased,
And man shall not break it – whatever thou may’st.
And stern to the haughty, but humble to thee,
This soul in its bitterest blackness shall be;
And our days seem as swift, and our moments more sweet,
With thee at my side, than with worlds at our feet.
One sigh of thy sorrow, one look of thy love,
Shall turn me or fix, shall reward or reprove.
And the heartless may wonder at all I resign –
Thy lips shall reply, not to them, but to mine.May, 1814

Now that’s not an easy poem to follow!

You Were My True Love

you were my true love
we walked in the world together
(though just for a time)
a parenthesis of spring –
I look upon in autumn

§§

your name I won’t speak
but your eyes they still haunt me
in my autumn dreams

(c) G.s.k. ’14