A Tear of Fidelity

Gently, sister of the buds — do not forsake us;
spring has come round, so why have you not come stepping by?
We had a rendezvous in the golden morrow,
amid a thousand colors and a thousand heady perfumes...
Return, then, to kin and companions and evening company,
to a mother's anguish and the desolate house,
to the loneliness of a night that without you gives no moonlight,
to a poet sunk in sorrow, despairing, disdained.

If my heart asks after you, what shall I claim?
And how am I to say that you will not return,
when you are on my lips and in my hearing,
and wherever the winds toss me, you were with me?
I water you with my murmurings and with my tears,
for the earth is not your resting place — it was within my ribs!

Yours is love, with all I have known and all I know not,
and mine the choking grief of remembrance in an aching mind.