Classic Poem

When sickness struck me I had thoughts that
It would cure me of my passion for you.
All it did was amplify my pain.
In hope I came to stay here, far from home,
In this place they said would help restore me.

If its good air can heal my body
Will any air relieve the fires of my love?
My trip across the land has been in vain;
My exile's search for cure is just more illness.

Alone with my passion, alone with my sorrow
I fling my turbulent thoughts to the sea,
It answers back with howling winds.
I sit on this hard rock and wish
I had a heart as hard as this rock.
Waves break against it like the sorrows
That have lashed my weakened body.
The wide, unquiet ocean as it heaves
Is like my heart at sunset,
A mist, like my heart's grief, rises and fills the world
And blurs the horizon to a smear of blood.

Sunset … How many lessons it holds
for the downcast lover
Day's death-throe, when the sun becomes its own
Funeral taper … it blots out certainty
And raises doubts behind dark veils;
It liquidates existence for a while,
Eradicates the contours of all things
Until daylight renews them.

I remembered you in daylight's valediction.
My heart hovered between hope and fear.
The sun's gold was dissolving into twilight
Over the dark, flesh-colored summits.
Between two clouds hung the sun
As though the universe, in sympathy,
Were shedding one final vermilion teardrop
To mingle with my own.
I felt that my life, too, was setting.
I saw my own evening in a mirror.