Aureae Rosae - The Heart's Sadness Poem by Barry Van Asten

Listen! For the heart no more sings with time
As the wind drums it's hollow dreams in chain...
It is the heart that seeks it's joy in pain;
Perfected in darkness, to fall in it's prime!
And now, wasted between ourselves, I sigh
For time turned back and those things, now past;
Where a tedious curse in the heart was cast
Upon one who lingers in days gone by,
To mirror the wonder of all, and see
The sorrows of dreaming that I embrace...
And still those eyes leave their awful trace,
Where things unsaid, remain: I'll return, maybe...
But I cannot comprehend those cold eyes now
That kept me from the world I used to know.

And I knew nothing of love's ways, or it's pain,
Pursuing by degrees where passions flow
Into the changed worn ways of long ago;
Into the eternal ache of emptiness again!
And the rose hath long wound it's frail wanderings
Through the dark dimensions and the lonesome night;
Stronger than the stars and the charmed moonlight,
To fathom the beauty found in all things.
But those lips of unwritten time shall fade;
Fade strange, in the endless curve and strain
Of other lips, in other ways, to fall lifeless again!
But between the risen art and this slain shade
Are meanings to things in which I care:
I sought love in sadness and never found it there!

And I'll turn away from the songs of love, I said.
When innocence falls, my heart shall follow
The dread whisper of betrayal, and tread
The dawn of desire...this rosy globe of sorrow,
To rest among the weeping rushes, calling:
Who is passing? Who leaves the dark silence there?
Who steps between the scented blossoms falling?
But I'll find no voice returning on the air.
And with ribbons in the wind, I will sow her name
That the heart's sadness shall bud and bloom in beauty.
I shall wander far and wide, with this accursed shame
That dared to keep me from love's mystery.
And in turning from life's pure ways, an eternity
Of shadows and what could have been, eluding me!

O flower of inevitability, I now see beyond
The dark continents of your tender kiss,
Where more is lost between the light and this
Utter nothingness that I cannot understand.
But what blissful past returns again to weep
Like some cathedral ghost, outside time?
This triple-throated scribe of love's pantomime
Is time's honoured maid in the regions of sleep.
And the hollow tappings of a God, still shakes
At the memory of love, thrown into sorrow,
When I would to her sweet lips, softly go...
Yet what rage grinds against the soul, and wakes
The pitiful heart without her touch,
That given would have meant so much?