WHO SAYS WORDS WITH MY MOUTH?

WHO SAYS WORDS WITH MY MOUTH?

By Jalaluddin Rumi

Translated by Coleman Barks

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Jalluddin Rumi was the most famous 13th century poet of Persia. Rumi was the Emperor Akbar's favourite poet.

The above poem is a beautiful and enchanting meditation on our true identity. The simplicity of the poem resonates. It appears that Rumi composed his poems in a trance like state of revelation.

From : Essential Rumi by Rumi, Coleman Barks (Translator)

Chorus of the Rescued

Today is International Holocaust Day. A remembrance day of the liberation of Auschwitz where 1.1 million Jews perished. 

If your heart is attuned to the brevity and frailty of life and the human soul, then you will clearly hear Nelly Sachs' plea. It  describes the trepidation and  trauma of survivors in returning to normal life  in a heart-wrenching manner.

Chorus of the Rescued. 

By Nelly Sachs 

Translated by Michael Roloff

We, the rescued,

From whose hollow bones death had begun to whittle his flutes,

And on whose sinews he had already stroked his bow—

Our bodies continue to lament

With their mutilated music.

We, the rescued,

The nooses would for our necks still dangle

Before us the blue air—

Hourglasses still fill with out dripping blood.

We, the rescued,

The worms of fear still feed on us.

Our constellation is buried in dust.

We, the rescued,

Beg you:

Show us your sun…. but gradually.

Lead us from star to star, step by step.

Be gentle when you teach us to live again.

Lest the song of a bird,

Or a pail being filled at the well,

Let our badly sealed pain burst forth again

And carry us away—

We beg you:

Do not show us any angry dog, not yet—

It could be, it could be

That we will dissolve into dust—

Dissolve into dust before your eyes.

For what binds our fabric together?

We whose breath vacated us,

Whose soul fled to Him out of that midnight?

Long before our bodies were rescued

Into the arc of the moment.

We, the rescued,

We press your hand

We look into your eye—but all that binds us together now is leave-taking.

The leave-taking in the dust

Binds us together with you.

Nelly Sachs was a German poet and dramatist who became a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas “I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people.”

In “Chorus of the Rescued,” the pain described is their attempts to come to terms with the certainty of their deaths and the surprising reprieve given to the survivors. Sachs utilizes striking imagery such as; death had begun to “whittle his flutes” from their hollow bones and “hourglasses still fill with our dripping blood” In their weakened state, fear is an obstacle that they cannot overcome. A reason to hope has been so recently restored to them that they need special treatment to embrace it. “Our constellation is buried in the dust. We, the rescued, beg you: show us your sun, but gradually” . Their hope is tinged with timidity and uncertainty because they are barely clinging to composure and admit that it would only take a slight trigger for them to lose their equilibrium. If they face that degree of suffering again they will “dissolve into dust before your eyes” .

 Later in the poem, the speaker asks, “for what binds our fabric together?” Searching for the connection that allows them to relate to others, the answer appears in the lines that follow, “all that binds us together now is leave-taking”

Sachs makes sense of pain by noting that it is what binds people together. They are united with others through shared experience of loss suffered and united with the diverse population because they need new strength to rebuild their lives.

 This poem, as Milosz said,  “describe the beauty of the simplest things and exemplify the effort to resist the temptation of utter despair” 

 From : Art from the ashes: A Holocaust Anthology

Guarding The Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding

Guarding The Air: Selected Poems of Gunnar Harding
translated and edited by Roger Greenwald (Black Widow Press, 2014).
321 pages. ISBN 978-0-9856122-7-6. US $24

To arrive at nothing is no reason for disappointment
if arriving at something was never one’s purpose.
(from “The Star-diver”)



While many poetry readers are familiar with the Swedish Poet Tomas Tranströmer, the 2012 Nobel Laureate for literature, they may not know that Sweden harbors other great poets. Guarding the Air pays wonderful homage to one of them, Gunnar Harding, by presenting work that spans a lifetime of poetry.

For nearly half a century, as a poet, writer, translator, editor and literary critic, Gunnar Harding has been at the center of Swedish literary life. He started as a jazz musician, studied painting in Stockholm, and made his literary debut in 1967. He has published eighteen volumes of poetry, as well as translations and nonfiction, and has won many prestigious literary awards in Sweden, including the Dobloug Prize from the Swedish Academy.

Guarding the Air is the first comprehensive selection of Harding’s work drawn from most of his volumes of poetry written in verse (prose poems are not included). It begins with a crisp but essential introduction by the translator and editor, Roger Greenwald, an American poet who is well known for his translations of Scandinavian poetry. (His  selections of work by such poets as Norway’s Rolf Jacobsen and Tarjei Vesaas have won him many translation awards.)  He has also done readers a service by translating Gunnar Harding’s prefaces to three of his Swedish volumes of selected poems. The book also features line drawings by the poet that lend it a special charm.

Harding’s interest in poetry and culture spans many continents and cultures, and he is candid in listing his inspirational sources. In a preface to one of his volumes of selected poems, Wherever the Wind Is Blowing, he refers to the English orator Edward Young’s saying that “we are born originals but we die as copies.” But Harding argues that in “conversation” with others, we gradually become original. His evolution as a poet bears witness to that process. Art, freedom, love, memory and shared experiences, the passage of time, sensuality, and mortality are some of the many themes that get beautifully woven into the rich tapestries of Harding’s poems. The diversity of the subject matter helps to make this collection resonate, whether in a poem about a wandering shoemaker or in poems exploring music and art. And Greenwald has done a magical job in capturing the intensity and depth of feeling in the poetry.

Life pulsating in many corners forms an integral part of Harding’s poetry. His poems achieve a fine balance of emotional and philosophical content. One can never underestimate his capacity for tenderness, as in the first poem in this collection, “Northwest Express,” which starts with these lovely lines:

    even in our sleep there are cables
    between us. we are coupled
    to each other like the railway cars
    on their way to the sea

For Harding, feelings are important in poetry. He articulates this in a preface: “I know it sounds sentimental, but I believe it is important to keep faith in this truth of the imagination. Moreover — even though it sounds still more sentimental — I believe that it is important to insist that the feelings that come from the heart are sacred. If they are missing, then we are facing a devaluation not only of truth and beauty, but also of poetry.”

Although love is the best balm for man’s soul, the poet knows the absurdity and misery of loving everyone, as finely evoked in these lines:

    Of course you can love everyone,
    but when you have loved everyone
    there’s no one left,
    only the rustle of clothing
    rushing down with a sparkle
    toward the end of the century — the last one,
    soon to be the one before the last, or the next one.
    So much had to be left behind,
    unsaid.
    (“Rossetti Sleepless in the Park”)

The poet is also aware of the ambivalence that hides behind love:

    Do you still love me? Smoke grows stale in coils above our shoulders,
    the answer is a timid smile. The answer to such questions
    is a smile one can vanish in and still remain outside of.
    (“Guarding the Air”)

Obstacles to experiencing the true feel of changes in the beautiful outer world also command the poet’s attention. The poem “Ich Weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten” (whose title is from the opening lines of Heinrich Heine’s “Die Lorelei”: “I do not know what it might mean / that I am so sad”) starts with a question that arises from Heine’s and then moves on to the predicament of our consciousness amidst mechanized urban life. The last line in the poem’s final stanza has a certain poignancy.

    What name shall we give this dark electricity?
    I’m not saying, but I know that it changes everything —
    the season, the setting, the temperature, yes the mood itself —
    and leads us back to ourselves
    like the subway trains that find their way home at night
    along the tracks of current, a series of cars,
    each one scrawled over with its own darkness.

Memory and the associated feelings surface in many poems. In the fascinating poem “Puberty,” the speaker conjures up his school years, a whole class that has been submerged in his memory just as it once was submerged in the green water of a chlorinated swimming pool. The poem ends with an image of a boy (no doubt the poet himself) diving into those waters/memories — and being brought up short by the passage of time:

    year after year
            the boy in the Tarzan swimsuit
                 has been bouncing up and down on the trampoline.
         howling in a shrill breaking voice
    he dives into the water
              to gaze in silence
       at the girls’ legs. but they're already married
    and all rolled up in lilac bathrobes.

In “Persephone,” the poet comes up with a striking simile: “He will carry her like eczema in his memory.” Again, in  “Triptych for Nils Kölare,” the poet notes:

    Memory is as red as a Sunday morning
    when no one has ventured past the long building yet
    so as not to disturb the people dozing there
    in silent chairs inside the barber shop.
    Memory is their hair, which grows imperceptibly
    to replace what has slowly turned white and been swept into piles
        on the floor.

As the image of white hair reminds us, the longer our memories are, the closer thoughts of mortality come. Even Harding’s early poems are mindful of this. “September,” for example,  is set against the backdrop of the war in Vietnam. A frayed poster says “USA OUT OF INDOCHINA,” and the poet observes: “Many / have died so that you might be born, this / unites you with those / who are dying right now.” The poem proceeds to this moving passage.

                          Death lives in the empty spaces
                 between the houses, in the empty spaces
          between people. There are large empty spaces
    between us. When we die
                        we enter them.

But the poem concludes with a touch of surprising, if somewhat grim, humor:

             Here there is still wind. I
                     take it into my lungs. The bells are ringing.
       The wind makes them swing
    back and forth
                            and then not back.
          Watch out!

In a later poem, “The National Hospital, Oslo, September 1976,” mortality is considerably more concrete and immediate. Although the poem is tinged with some humor in the poet’s dreamt conversation with his dying father, it turns somber towards the end:

    Death begins early, one step at a time.
    Is it as full of life
    as life is of death?
    Am I almost as much over there
    as you are here?
    The contours of two worlds fall through each other
    and outside the sickroom window
    the big chestnut tree beside the parking lot
    rushes in the wind.
    It is full of fruit.
    The prickly green-gold husks are life.
    The red-brown kernels death.
    They hit the ground hard
    and crack on the asphalt.

*

Art is an ever-present theme in Harding’s work, and thanks to his background, the poems engage not only with poetry but with music, painting, sculpture, and the lives of various artists. Harding’s deep connection with various genres of music emerges in many poems in this collection. One can spot it in poems such as “Europe—A Winter Journey,” “Davenport Blues,” “Danny’s Dream,” “Für Elise,” and “The Flute Player.” In “Winter Tour,” the poet moves from depiction of a cold winter day when even “the shining lake of summer has shrunk to a traffic mirror” to an evening immersed in jazz.

    In the evening the landscape we traveled through all day
    gets measured on the bass drum and illuminated by a light bulb.
    There’s a lazy pulse coming from inside it,
    beating in the stage floor, through my soles
    and up through my body.
    The band plays “Moose March” and I recite
    “Back to the beginning
    when only the hundred thousand notes beyond the scale
    are real.” After the reading
    I go backstage while the music continues in the hall,
    one, two, soon three cigarettes from here.

The beginning of “Persephone,” a poem inspired in part by a Magritte painting, illustrates the precision of Harding’s imagery:

    Silence, built of bricks from old tenements,
    glued on with every layer of wallpaper
    where spring is pressed into darkening floral patterns.
    She opens the drapes and a feeble light describes
    all these states of the soul, highly nuanced and distinct
    but so sad that they lack names of their own.
    Streaks of light so broad that she can walk on them
    out above the roofs where the wind is tossing pigeons around, light
    so distant that it can’t remember its source,
    and now it finally sinks to the ground
    through the sun-panels on the linoleum.

Color symbols add richness to “Rugosa Roses,” with its sexual undertones:

    The sky was improbably blue, soundless and blue
    but our friend at the black lake had seen
    the old airforce general sitting in his chair in dress whites
    and he had said: “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Again at the end of the poem, when the couple muse over their stay in the house, the color symbols turn into sensual images:

    But the rose hedge has grown tall and dense.
    It covers the whole house, and we’re the only ones who know about
    the dark room inside
    where the white flower flows out.

Harding’s fascination with painting is evident in many of his poems. “Painting has also meant a great deal to me,” says the poet in a preface. “At one time that was really what I wanted to devote myself to.” This urge is sometimes stronger than the urge to write poems, as the poet remarks with disarming (or defensive) humor in “Watercolors.” He steps into a river and sees the beautiful reflection of blue sky, the mountains, and the landscape nearby.

    My desire to write worse and worse poems
    still isn’t as strong as my yearning
    to paint a really lousy watercolor
    where a completely hopeless blue runs out into the water,
    only distantly related to that blue
    that just now seemed as momentous
    as becoming water oneself and reflecting a mountain.

The underlying  anxiety evident here about quality in art and in particular in painting crops up in other poems, like “1958 (Miss Setterdahl’s Art School)” and “Imperfect Tense,” from Harding’s sequence about Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

    Yet a sea of flowers
    still covers the black soil
    just as his embroidered vest
    covers the darkness in his heart.
    Each flower has shown itself worthy
    of having a portrait of its own.
    Therefore he stands weeping in the garden.
    His brush goes too slow.
    The flowers wilt, the paint dries out.
    The wardrobe stands there,
    dark with her gowns:
    they too are lifeless.
    This is called “The Post-Romantic.”
    He calls it his life.

In the brilliant title poem of this selection, “Guarding the Air,” contemplations of art slowly evolve into a somber philosophical musing on the way we live and how we can change to find the right path. The poem starts with these arresting lines:

    Take a feather, dip it in ink and draw a swallow.
    It will be a swallow that’s missing one feather,
    just the one that would enable it to fly.

This grand poem, which has a circular pattern, is replete with images and speaks about unexpected correspondences in the urban space, our somnambulistic existence, freedom, love, and the innocence of childhood.

    How long will it take? How long
    will it take you to think everything that’s yours to think
    and what will be left to think then? There will be nothing
    to think then and you will be filled with a deep serenity.
    Clothed in total silence you will be able to observe
    how the pebbles crack like swallow’s eggs, but they crack without
        a sound
    and you understand the silence that pours out from inside them
    as content, a content you recognize from yourself
    and you can never again lose your way, no, never again lose your way.

This poem demonstrates that Harding is a visual poet of the highest order. His poems are rainbows of colors that acquire symbolic meanings dependent on their themes and their contexts. This is understandable, since he started out as a painter. Harding says as much in a preface: “I’ve never been ashamed of the visual qualities in my poetry, even though they have never been in fashion during the whole time I’ve been writing. Because at a certain time in my youth I took the step over to poetry from painting, I have always regarded the poetic image as central.”

That the poetic image is central means it is not there for its own sake: Harding’s poetry explores many themes of everyday life that engage the heart and the mind of the reader. His poetry is thus a rare combination of beauty and intellect. There are lines in almost all the poems that made me pause, ponder, and move forward, such as these from “The Star-diver,” one of the finest poems in this selection:

    To arrive at nothing.... And nonetheless the disappointment
    is grounds for a new beginning, and nonetheless
    the beginning is grounds for new disappointment, and nonetheless
    the grounds are what one didn’t mean to arrive at
    and didn’t arrive at, either — dancing stars.

“The Star-diver” is a magnum opus on our identity and alienation, on disorder and the void that surrounds us. The poem pulls the reader into its magical canvas, thanks to the translation’s fluid grace.

Roger Greenwald deserves thanks for making the gift of this book to serious poetry readers across the globe. These translations of Gunnar Harding’s poems are so pellucid that I can only agree with an advance comment by the American poet Kenneth Koch, who wrote: “It is hard to believe these poems are translations — they are so clear, so exhilarating, have such immediate and uninterrupted effect.”

Guarding the Air proves beyond doubt that Gunnar Harding is a modern poet with a distinctive stamp of his own. Steeped in broad cross-cultural influences, Harding has masterfully crafted vision and music into free verse. His integration of literary and artistic traditions into imaginative creations of broad scope allows us to experience a new realm of poetry that is accessible, reflective, and rich with depth and inventiveness.

                Gunnar Harding (Author, Photo by Paula Tranströmer) and Roger Greenwald (Translator, Editor)

URGENTLY

URGENTLY

By Eugenio de Andrade

Translated by Alexis Levitin


It’s urgent — love.
It’s urgent — a boat upon the sea.

It’s urgent to destroy certain words,
hate, solitude, and cruelty,
some moanings,
many swords.

It’s urgent to invent a joyfulness,
multiply kisses and cornfields,
discover roses and rivers
and glistening mornings — it’s urgent.

Silence and an impure light fall upon
our shoulders till they ache.
It’s urgent — love, it’s urgent
to endure.


Eugénio de Andrade was arguably Portugal’s best-known poet and won all of Portugal’s major literary awards: the prestigious Camões Prize, France’s Prix Jean Malrieu (1989), and the 1996 European Prize for Poetry. Marguerite Yourcenar has referred to “the well-tempered clavier” of his poems, and Spanish critic and poet Ángel Crespo has written that “his voice was born to baptize the world.”

Eugénio de Andrade’s poetry has always exhibited a carefully evoked simplicity. Through naked word and image, he strives to convey what he calls “the rough or sweet skin of things.” Distrustful of abstractions, he focuses on the world of matter, proclaiming a love for “words smooth as pebbles, rough as rye bread. Words that smell of clover and dust, loam and lemon, resin and sun.” The four classical elements of earth, water, air, and fire are never absent from his work, nor is the human body, whose sensuality and sexuality lie at the heart of Dark Domain  For this poet, proud to be called solar and pagan, the body itself is the final “metaphor for the universe.”

The above poem is simple, yet moving , and conveys a real sense of urgency and need for  creating more joy in this world through love.

Source:- Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry by Eugenio de Andrade. Translated by Alexis Levitin

Just

Just

By José Craveirinha

Translated from the Portuguese by Arthur Brakel

Love,

Not so much

Please

Now and again

take me in your arms

and wrap me in the brown and yellow caress of your desire

Now and again

so that I can forget

until morning when they come to get us

and we don’t know if we’ll be back

and if we’re man or thing

and if we can know the nature of true laughter

and if this be true or false

Call the Children

and the house

and the woman with the frightened eyes

without the waking appearance of remorse

Love,

not so much

please

Just now and again

take me in your crossed arms

and wrap me in the brown and yellow caress of your love

and in the peaceful certainty of your affection

Now and again

Just now and again

take me in your arms

my love

José Craveirinha  was a journalist in Mozambique, East Africa, who became the foremost lyric poet of his nation. His early poems inspired African pride and protest during the long (and successful) struggle for independence from Portugal.

The child of a Portuguese father and a black mother of the Ronga ethnicity, Craveirinha was raised in the language and culture of Portugal. His poems, written in Portuguese, address such issues as racism and the Portuguese colonial domination of Mozambique. He was one of the African pioneers of the Négritude movement.

As a journalist, Craveirinha contributed to numerous Mozambican magazines . He also played football and coached other athletes. He arranged an athletic scholarship in the United States for Maria de Lurdes Mutola, who won a gold medal in track and field at the Olympics in 2000, and his son Stelio also held the national long jump record.

Craveirinha was awarded the Prémio Camões, the world's highest honour for lusophone literature, in 1991. He was considered several times for the Nobel Prize for Literature.In 2003, Craveirinha was declared a "national hero" by President Joaquim Chissano of Mozambique, who praised Craveirinha's literary contribution to the fight against colonialism.

What makes Craveirinha a great poet and person are human sympathy, unpretentiousness, a passionate sense of justice, attachment to his land and people, uninhibited lyrical eroticism, a powerful command of words, the directness and concentrated vigor of his verses, an extraordinary combination of reality and dream-like imagery, and a profound seriousness alternating with subtle irony. In 1979, during a private conversation, when the talk turned to the struggle for a better Mozambican society out of love for humanity, the poet wondered why there was so much hate and so little generosity even after the victory had been won. He concluded: "It is easier for man to be heroic than to be humble.”

Source : Bending the Bow: An Anthology of African Love Poetry by Frank M Chipasula (Editor)

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.


Adam Zagajewski is perhaps the greatest Polish poet alive today. Zagajewski shot to fame among American audience after “New Yorker” silently featured this influential poem in the first issue to be published after the attacks of Sept 11, 2011 .While watching the faces of the refugees from Syria, especially Children, in TV, I couldn't help but remember this poem and find solace in it. We are living in a mutilated world in every sense. But we must accept it with grace, as the poet echoes. Great poems have therapeutic power, like this one.

This poem juxtaposes the disfigurement and the simple joys of life. The poet is trying to convey a philosophical conviction that one must learn to accept or praise the faults of the world to enable us to see the beauty and help to heal the mutilated world. We as a society must remember the good things when times begin to get arduous. 

The poem moves from the assertion "Try to praised the mutilated world" through "You must praise" to "You should praise" to the imperative "Praise" as it catalogues a series of mutilated objects from "the nettles that methodically overgrow/the abandoned homesteads of exiles" to the refugees heading nowhere/...the executioners singing joyfully" and to the simple "grey feather a thrust lost".

Zagajewski thus uses repetition with the phrase "Praise the Mutilated World," and each time the phrase is written, it means something completely different because of the tone that is being used and the urgency that is being asked to praise the mutilated world. The tone changes throughout each stanza, it changes from an asking tone, to a demanding tone, to a parental tone then a pleading tone .The poet thus reminds us to “praise the mutilated world” , filled as it with exiles, the debris of war, refugees and other contingencies but also with “gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns”

Indeed we must praise the mutilated world, for the very reason that praising itself is a hard a task. The poem doesn't say how to do it. But it puts into words what one wanted to do and felt one had to find a way to do. The 'hope' that is beautifully captured in the last line reminds us that joy will overpower sorrow.

As we reflect on our own suffering and reach out to alleviate the suffering of the world, the words of  Maurice Merleau-Ponty , a pivotal figure in twentieth century French philosophy, comes to mind- “ The human world is an unfinished system and the same radical contingency which threatens it with discord also rescues it from the inevitability of disorder and prevents us from despairing of it." 


Source: Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)

Kiss poem by Catullus (Poem No. 5)

The Latin poet Catullus (born in Verona 84 bc), who died roughly at the age of thirty, was the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair in an extended way. Other poets treated the subject of “love,” allowing the flushed cheeks or alabaster limbs of this or that woman to enter the frame of their poems, but it was Catullus who wrote verses with a near-obsessional passion around a single woman whose entire presence, body and mind, fills the lines of his poetry. From the first excruciating moments of infatuation with the woman he called “Lesbia,” through the torrid transports of physical love, to the betrayals that leave him stricken, Catullus told it all, and, in so doing, did more than anyone to create the form we recognize today as the love story.

Though historians have many versions about the identity of Lesbia, what is certain about her is that she was married and that Catullus’s relationship with her was adulterous. Of Catullus's many poems devoted to his relationship with Lesbia, the most popular are his 'Kiss' poems and the ones addressed to her pet sparrow. The below is the most popular 'kiss' poem of Catullus

Kiss poem by Catullus (Poem No. 5)

Translated by Peter Green

Let's live, Lesbia mine, and love—and as for

scandal, all the gossip, old men's strictures,

value the lot at no more than a farthing

Suns can rise and set ad infinitum—

for us, though, once our brief life's quenched, there's only

one unending night that's left to sleep through.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

then a thousand more, a second hundred,

then yet another thousand then a hundred—

then when we've notched up all these many thousands,

shuffle the figures, lose count of the total,

so no maleficent enemy can hex us

knowing the final sum of all our kisses.

This is poet's call to Lesbia to join with the poet in living and loving to the fullest. The poem begins by the poet pleading to Lesbia not to pay any attention to old men's morals and strictures . The poet adopts the pose of the lover whose passion makes him (and his love) vulnerable to external but intrusive forces that seek somehow to negate his passion.

He, therefore, suggests to spend their moments of togetherness with maximum pleasure and contentment. There is an ecstatic frenzy in the piling up of kisses and he provides brevity of life as a rational for his overindulgence in passion.  I liked the poet's idea of confusing the number of kisses, making it numberless, to avoid hex ( bad eye or curse),  as envy comes only when there is clarity in the number of kisses. It was also believed in ancient time that precise knowledge had special powers: knowing the exact number of kisses exchanged by the lovers would enable malevolent outsiders to cast a spell on them.