Twelve poems

Chapter 5: DIEU D’AMOUR [A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]

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About This Book

A sequence of lyrical poems moves between sunlit Mediterranean landscapes and inward, elegiac reflection, using vivid sensory detail to evoke thyme-scented hills, wind-driven seas, and classical ruins. Several pieces celebrate beauty and the transports of sight and song, while others register loss, mourning, and the human costs of conflict, portraying bereavement, domestic desolation, and the persistence of memory. The collection alternates narrative vignettes and compact meditations, shifting tone from exultant natural observation to restrained grief and philosophical acceptance, exploring how art, place, and memory mediate desire, beauty, and mortality.

DIEU D’AMOUR
[A CASTLE IN CYPRUS]

Beauty hath two great wings
That lift me to her height,
Though steep her secret dwelling clings
’Twixt earth and light.
Thither my startled soul she brings
In a murmur and stir of plumes,
And blue air cloven,
And in aerial rooms
Windowed on starry springs
Shows me the singing looms
Whereon her worlds are woven;

Then, in her awful breast,
Those heights descending,
Bears me, a child at rest,
At the day’s ending,
Till earth, familiar as a nest,
Again receives me,
And Beauty veiled in night,
Benignly bending,
Drops from the sinking west
One feather of our flight,
And on faint sandals leaves me.