Love and Time
by Gideon Burton
after Shakespeare's sonnet 73
Though great with green the trees were sheared to bones,
their knobby joints in silhouette like ash
against the greying winter sky, cold dome
of twilight. Time, for me, is cruelly cached
behind horizons, cooling in the seas
that empty to oblivions beyond
the west of night -- now sinking by degrees,
now sealed in rest, now slowing till its gone,
no more in fiery-embered springtime spark,
no more in citric tongue-tart liquid flow,
expiring as a single day turns dark,
now faint, now fainter than all mists we know.
No way to stop the time nor stem its flow;
we love with passion all we must let go.
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Sonnet 73
by William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
