The Moment by Dannie Abse

You raise your eyes from the level book

as if deeply listening. You are further than I call.

Like Eurydice you wear a hurt and absent look,

but I’m gentle for the silence into which you fall so sadly.

What are you thinking? Do you love me?

Suddenly you are not you at all but a ghost

dreaming of a castle to haunt or a heavy garden;

some place eerie, and far from me. But now a door

is banging outside, so you turn your head surprised.

 

You speak my name and someone else has died.

 

by Dannie Abse

from Tenants of the house (1957)

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‘I Loved You – And Maybe Love…’ by Alexander Pushkin

I loved you – and maybe love

still smoulders in my heart;

but let my love not trouble

you or cause you any hurt.

I loved you but stayed silent,

timid, despairing, jealous;

I loved you truly – God grant

you such love from someone else.

 

by Александр Сергеевич Пушкин (Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin)

a.k.a. Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin

(1829)

translated by Robert Chandler

I Am by John Clare

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest–that I loved the best–
Are strange–nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.

 

by John Clare (1793 – 1864)