Come here and place your hand across my mouth
When I said you were beautiful it was true
You took an old cat and drowned it
How anybody could I really don’t know
But death is the friend of your frenzy
What meaning comes from meaningless words
more than words you meant to say?
far down within the ends of the world
where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Death is beauty
Silence my whispers
but I didn’t mean it
I just had to tell you.
you said you meant not to
Lo! Death is beauty
in a strange city lying alone
have gone to their eternal rest.
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently —
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free —
Up domes — up spires — up kingly halls —
Up fanes — up Babylon-like walls —
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers —
Up many and many a marvelous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
the melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
that all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol’s diamond eye —
Not the gaily-jeweled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass —
No swellings tell that winds may be
upon some far-off happier sea —
No heaving hint those winds have been
on seas less hideously serene.
But lo death is beauty; a stir is in the air!
The wave — there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
in slightly sinking, the dull tide —
As if their tops had feebly given
a void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow —
The hours are breathing faint and low —
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence.
Dpressedmuslimah 