Classic Poem

Cause of this stab in my side,
Girl I love, and have long loved,
Your colour God created,
Like the daisy is your brow.
Your red-gold is God's giving,
Your hair like a tongue of gold,
Your neck grows straight and slender,
Your breasts are full balls of yarn.
Your cheeks a charming scarlet,
Your brows, maid, are London black;
Your eyes like two bright brooches,
Your nose, it's on a dear girl.
Your smile, five joys of Mary;
Your flesh filches me from faith.
You are white as Saint Anne's child,
Fair colour and fine figure.

So sweet, under fine-spun hair,
So fair, come to the hillside.
Make our bed on a hill's breast,
Four ages under fresh birches,
The dale's green leaves its mattress,
And its fine curtains of fern,
And trees for a coverlet
To shield us from the showers.

I shall lie there like David,
Zealous prophet, for a tryst,
Solomon's father, who made
Seven psalms, for the dawnlight.
I will make, if she greets me,
Psalms of the kisses of love,
Seven the maiden's kisses,
Seven birches by the grave,
Seven vespers and masses,
Seven sermons from the thrush,
Seven leaf-covered lyrics,
Seven nightingales and boughs,
Seven strokes of ecstasy,
Seven gems, seven lyrics,
Seven songs to slim Morfudd's
Firm flesh, twenty times seven.
She will lock up no longer
The reckoning owed to love.