POSTSCRIPT
STRANGE FRIENDS
Yes, I admit I have used you,
Told you lies
Pretended many things I have not felt
Felt many things I would not speak of
Hard with desire, have closed my ears
To all your ruthful cries of no, don’t,
I really don’t want to,
Certain that your body must
Briefly applaud my lust
Until our moment comes
And the shame I subdued
Breaks over us again.
Then I see, in your sad and painful smile,
What a mess I have made of us,
How stupidly I have forced from you
What you did not want to give,
Divorced you from your faithfulness
Scorning that separation in myself.
You are not mine, of course, nor I yours:
Whom you love so darkly is far away,
Foreign, too strange you say to be a friend
And share your life and every day:
Whom I love I can’t expect to know:
So I’d laugh, you see, if in our bitter soil
Some friendly seed was to root and grow.
A SONG
Though once I was ashamed of you
I talk proudly of you now
And tell light and easy people
How your strongly-feeling heart
When giving once, gave all,
And how, day after day,
As the months grow into years
There is present in your thoughts
Someone you never see.
When loving I despised desire
But desiring still, met you,
Briefly then I was ashamed of you.
But I talk proudly of you now
To a girl I might have loved
(A strange ungiven soul
Who knows of nothing but herself)
Saying that by giving your heart away
You have found a kind of faith.
Once I could not love and want,
And in wanting you found shame.
But now I’ve seen your heart,
The heart I’ve never had,
And I have changed so much
Since those early days of shame
That in lonely moments I regret
Your heart’s not mine. No wonder
I talk proudly of you now.
.
