Sanctuario di Sangue - My Dying Bride

With your baronial motif
Mankind at your feet
and your opulent guests
With whom you do test
The whisper of your blood
The call to those you loved
Who lay down for you
For you to run them through

Carelessly dressed
I grovel highness
Beneath your stars and your moon
and your feminine doom

Beneath the shiver of your sea
and the gold that you bleed
On the wings of your charm
A promise of great harm

The light within us fades
As we shy away from day
The passion of her bite
and the glory of her sight
In a hive of open lore
We await the call to war
In an issue of drying blood
Lies the victim of our love

Regale me with lies
and punish me outright
The crisis of my empire
The volume of your desire

Your enfolding dark
Your beauty and your mark
I give you my veins
As we lay down in pain

I couldn't help the things we did
No matter where or how I hid
We live for every single night
Victorious in every fight

Death of the Beloved - Rainer Maria Rilke

She only knew of death what all men say:
that those it takes it thrusts into dumb night.
When he himself, though - no, not snatched away,
but tenderly unloosened from her sight,

had glided over to the unknown shades,
and when she felt that she had now resigned
the moonlight of his laughter to their glades,
and all his ways of being kind:

then all at once she came to understand
the dead through him, and joined them in their walk,
kin to them all; she let the others talk,

and paid no heed to them; and called that land
the fortunately-placed, the ever-sweet.
And groped out all its pathways for his feet.

Claire de Lune - Paul Verlaine

Claire de Lune

Votre âme est un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leurs déguisements fantasques.

Tout en chantant sur le mode mineur
L'amour vainqueur et la vie opportune
Ils n'ont pas l'air de croire à leur bonheur
Et leur chanson se mêle au clair de lune,

Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.

Moonlight (translation by Norman R. Shapiro)

Your soul is like a landscape fantasy

Where masks and Bergamasks, in charming wise,

Strum lutes and dance, just a bit sad to be

Hidden beneath their fanciful disguise.

Singing in minor mode of life's largesse

And all victorious love, they yet seem quite

Reluctant to believe their happiness,

And their song mingles with the pale moonlight,

The calm, pale moonlight, whose sad beauty, beaming,

Sets the birds softly dreaming in the trees,

And makes the marbles fountains, gushing, streaming -

Slender, jet-fountains - sob their ecstasies.

White

She wore white
Hoping to preserve her innocence
Like a peach canned in a jar
Imbuing the room with its wild aroma upon unscrewing
She wore red
Tearing through life
Wanting to be noticed
If only for an instant
She wore blue
On those days when the rain is relentless
And the drip drip sound
Echoes the emptiness of her heart
She wore the colors of life in all their splendor and variety
She wore life itself grafted to her skin
And with each breath
She came closer to her death



(This poem of an unknown poet was published in the Greek magazine "Μοτέρ", issue 15. It's one of a kind, so I thought it would be fantastic to share it with you. Hope you like it!)

I Died for Beauty - Emily Dickinson

I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth,--the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

Invocation - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou art fled away.

How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade
Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismayed;
Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure; -
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good: -
Between thee and me
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.

I love Love -though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
Spirit, I love thee -
Thou art love and life! O come!
Make once more my heart thy home!