Since First I saw your Face, Thomas Ford's Music of Sundry Kinds

SINCE first I saw your face I resolved to honour and renown ye;
If now I be disdained I wish my heart had never known ye.
What? I that loved and you that liked, shall we begin to wrangle?
No, no, no, my heart is fast, and cannot disentangle.

If I admire or praise you too much, that fault you may forgive me;
Or if my hands had stray'd but a touch, then justly might you leave
me.
I ask'd you leave, you bade me love; is 't now a time to chide me?
No, no, no, I'll love you still what fortune e'er betide me.


Small Wire

My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web,
as doth the vine,
twiggy and wooden,
hold up grapes
like eyeballs,
as many angels
dance on the head of a pin.

God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love.
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.


Siren

I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.

I didn't want to go to Chicago with you.
I wanted to marry you, I wanted
Your wife to suffer.

I wanted her life to be like a play
In which all the parts are sad parts.

Does a good person
Think this way? I deserve

Credit for my courage--

I sat in the dark on your front porch.
Everything was clear to me:
If your wife wouldn't let you go
That proved she didn't love you.
If she loved you


Simply love

The clouds open up each day
to reveal your perfect smile,
the wind flows free reassuring
that your there watching over me.

And those three words
meant everything to me,
but I know that those same words
aren't everyting that they should be.

But when you laughed, I laughed
and when you cried, I'd wipe away your tears,
and when you were scared,
we'd run away together...

but I know this also to be true,
I can never stop loving you.

Those soft sweet whispers


Silent is the House

Come, the wind may never again
Blow as now it blows for us;
And the stars may never again shine as now they shine;
Long before October returns,
Seas of blood will have parted us;
And you must crush the love in your heart, and I the love in mine!


Signs and Wonders

The bread is mine
Unmixed with leaven
And the purple wine
Of the Vines of Heaven;
I have asked to see
If my love shall be
At the Throne of Three
With the splendid Seven.

To a blinding car
Four living creatures
Enhamessed are,
Whence One whose features
Outshone the skies
At noon, replies
With her burning eyes—
The eternal teachers—

“Thy love is a sword
In the heart of slaughter,
Thy love is a word
Of the high-king’s daughter,
A song that is sung


Sigh On, Sad Heart, for Love's Eclipse

Sigh on, sad heart, for Love's eclipse
And Beauty's fairest queen,
Though 'tis not for my peasant lips
To soil her name between:
A king might lay his sceptre down,
But I am poor and nought,
The brow should wear a golden crown
That wears her in its thought.
The diamonds glancing in her hair,
Whose sudden beams surprise,
Might bid such humble hopes beware
The glancing of her eyes;
Yet looking once, I look'd too long,
And if my love is sin,
Death follows on the heels of wrong,


Shui lung yin

Like a flower, but not a flower
No one cares when it falls
And lies discarded at the roadside
But though
Unmoved, I think about
The tangle of wounded tendrils
Lovely eyes full of sleep
About to open,yet
Still in dreams, following the wind ten thousand miles
In search of love
Startled, time and again, by the oriole's cry

Do not pity the flower that flies off
Grieve for the western garden
Its fallen red already beyond mending --
Now, after morning rain
What's left?


Shudders of Flowers

In summer eves the flowers have languors of
Women, and suffer as do souls with love;
Imploring hymens they shall die of soon,
They dream and tremble underneath the moon;
Yea, flowers have looks like women's great moist eyes,
They are as full of love and coy surprise.
And roses, white as the immaculate globes
That peep from under dark half-opened robes,
Roses amid the darkness green, while sings
The nightingale her moon-imaginings
And dies with passion for their bodies pale,
Roses forth bursting from their odorous veil,


Show Me Your Way Out

Like a silkworm weaving
her house with love
from her marrow,
and dying
in her body's threads
winding tight, round
and round,
I burn
desiring what the heart desires.

Cut through, O Lord,
my heart's greed,
and show me
your way out,

O Lord white as jasmine


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