|
Compassion
For Mahrrand Paunjapt
You and I speak of compassion.
Is it easier for you to feel it
young as you are?
Wherever I go, am I always looking
for the Good Samaritan,
do I see myself as the wayfarer
set upon by brigands?
‘Your poems are never cruel,
They do not ‘wound as mine
Have done in that painful past.
Your compassion flows, unendingly
in a wide river.
I am a waterway full of sandbars, rocks,
quicksands, hazards.
Your life’s river
is safer to navigate,
there’s no threat for the
voyager.
Da Vinci’s Marble Girl
Da Vinci’s marble girl
turns her gaze at the centuries.
I stand beside her in the library,
once, the Principessa’s boudoir,
an open book of Leopardi’s poems
in my hands, my eyes skimming over
the pages, my lips silently forming those
lines
The white gold light of a Mediterranean
winter enters through the windows, the heavy
drapes drawn aside to reveal vista upon vista,
the faintly veined marble of those softly
contoured cheeks suffusedcby the prismatic
glow of a sun reflecting alpine snows and
silvery blue-gray lakes.
I fill her eyes with my dreams,
place unwritten poems on her lips.
Is she more worldly wise than I am ?
Yet she appears to be untouched by time
or by the changing seasons.
Where did Leonardo come upon her?
What was her name?
Was it whispered only to his heart?
Did her lips warm only to his?
She is so alive to me,
I wish I could share the Mediterranean
Oranges I eat, the juice-filled pears,
Walnuts prised freshly out of the shell
the chilled white wine tasting of thawing glaciers
and my poems which I long to read to her.
She is immortal, Leonardo’s girl.
Reminds me of my own mortality,
My own past, my vanished youth
Sculptured out of air.
|