Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LET YOU WHO WOULD BE LOVERS, by FRANK ERNEST HILL


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LET YOU WHO WOULD BE LOVERS, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Let you who would be lovers
Last Line: And a lost key.
Subject(s): Love; Sacrifices


Let you who would be lovers
Learn to make pyres,
Throwing the rest of your lives,
With your loves, on the fires.

Leave, when the flame has guttered
To a sombre spark,
This husk of a glorious room
And the hurt of its dark.

Yours was an ivory city?
Seek the soil's sharp
Acid of sweat -- roughen hands
That were smooth on a harp.

Leave the known walls, the known plying
Of hand or mind,
Known dusk, known lights the known door
And the void behind.

Perilous these as chasms
When you shall move
Haunting a lean half circle
Filled once with love;

Moving expectant always,
Always betrayed,
Led to an ambush, for loss
To impale on his blade;

Stabbed like a waking blind man
Who thought to see,
And knows the locked door of his night
And a lost key.





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