Poem: Two Love Sonnets

I.

If I hand you a chalice,

Will you drink of the wine pressed fresh from my heart?

A vintage free from taint or malice,

Though victim of Sadness’s envenomed dart,

Drink it up, my love, until exquisite inebriation,

Drives all coldness from your limbs,

And ignites the fires of your imagination,

Ensuring the prosperity of your most passionate whims!

Let me dapple your neck with crimson kisses,

So that your snowy skin may sip of the wine,

That inflames my days with unfulfilled blisses,

That I pray – I implore – will make you mine!

And as the liquor of my love pulses quick through your veins,

I know that, from my thoughts, you can ne’er be estranged.

 

II.

My days are enriched with the paint of your palette,

That enrobes me with colours too vivid to bear,

Let me tend to your wishes like a well-trained valet,

Whose only salary is the want of touching your hair,

Unwitting, you keep me slave to your spell,

That addicts me to the promise of your absent perfume,

Drawn secret from Aphrodite’s love-philtre well,

Infused with the mead and the milk of the moon,

My nights are spent on a hot-bed of yearning,

Yoking my dreams to an envisioned paradise,

Found in a topography, ancient men of learning,

Claim can only be sought in the expanse of your eyes,

So, I look into those orbs, and stare and I stare,

At the rapture unbounded I see awaiting me there.