I wanted The Lion's Bride but found a bookmark in this place
Carpe Diem by Gwen Harwood, from Poems, 1963
"Carpe diem." Your voice attests
this charity of solitude,
ours as we like to use or waste.
You wait for me. The moment rests
like a dry wafer on my tongue.
It is my future that I taste.
Still between kiss and eyelid fall
there's time to change, to turn this day
into unrealized regret.
Tasted and known you will be all,
an everlasting hunger in
this body that will not forget.
Half-drunken with at last, the mind
performs fantastic pantomimes
of thought, conjures away tomorrow,
hunts through its bag of tricks to find
illusion's water-into-wine,
dissolves in smoke all future sorrow
and prompts my sober tongue to try
words unrehearsed, as if in cool
mastery of intended pleasure:
"Carpe diem, my dear one, lie
light in my arms and on my life."
Far beyond memory or measure
stretches the time of grief that I
still, this one moment, might escape,
while my true tongue that has not learned
lying, and will not learn to lie,
steadfast and dumb waits on my word.
I give my body to be burned.
.... yeah, uhm, I'll be back in 2003 right now.
"Carpe diem." Your voice attests
this charity of solitude,
ours as we like to use or waste.
You wait for me. The moment rests
like a dry wafer on my tongue.
It is my future that I taste.
Still between kiss and eyelid fall
there's time to change, to turn this day
into unrealized regret.
Tasted and known you will be all,
an everlasting hunger in
this body that will not forget.
Half-drunken with at last, the mind
performs fantastic pantomimes
of thought, conjures away tomorrow,
hunts through its bag of tricks to find
illusion's water-into-wine,
dissolves in smoke all future sorrow
and prompts my sober tongue to try
words unrehearsed, as if in cool
mastery of intended pleasure:
"Carpe diem, my dear one, lie
light in my arms and on my life."
Far beyond memory or measure
stretches the time of grief that I
still, this one moment, might escape,
while my true tongue that has not learned
lying, and will not learn to lie,
steadfast and dumb waits on my word.
I give my body to be burned.
.... yeah, uhm, I'll be back in 2003 right now.