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.
Melodies — you are of them, melodies,
and a sweet echo, and a speaking remembrance;
O yearning of intimacy in an age of parting,
and a passion in the heart, overwhelming and unbridled;
the return of echoes — I, everlasting —
And songs, O sweetest of songs,
through the nights of a lifetime, in the melody of the beguiled;
time turned defiant and hopes came to naught,
and a love of which the tellers never drank their fill,
passing in the fold of the immortal seconds.
Melodies — how they danced once,
and on the cheeks a flame from them,
and in her eyes my life is one glance —
And breaths rose high with the fates,
and on our lips the burning of kisses,
pressing beauty into two cups of rapture.
O hopes of a lifetime, O sweetness of the dew,
O loftiness of the cedars, O splendor of the hills,
O good morning in the dawn of life —
