Naveed Khalid Poems

What use my wit if not by love can grow,
And that faculty alone sustains me on wings;
When no thought but thy thought in words is writ,
Nor moves me more thy breath in winter's cold;
...

Moths gather around the light and die
one after the other;
but their little wings are dried,
expos'd to the lamp,
...

Of what by night the star hath stirred the mind,
by vague impressions of poetry,
the forfeiting shadow of a missing you,
oft marked by love of hallowed fire;
...

I, too, find myself at odds
with what I can see not
to unhindered scope of light,
that by dark bewails the night
...

There is a bird on wings,
and he has never found solace,
that in the world by time;
nor by love his beauty,
...

I'll not speak to thee of thy unattended presence,
That in trash and tinsel hides,
This world in nurslings of immortality;
Oft goes unchecked by so gross a love
...

This world of what I write to my love so blind,
bereft of e'ery look that by looks more bright
than if from a bowl of stars you drink;
away from out of sight that to my mind still,
...

Then, that you see not, too, can fill the page
of eyes so blind, my love, to illumine more bright
than by what I write of ages that are dead,
that this world with what I least contend,
...

This that you know not by what cruel hand or eye,
that in age-old love of worn-out time,
sticks out his head through the staircase window
of a wall on high, above the archway;
...

Love's trance goes soaring high,
that thou hast set the clock a-going,
a-going, a-going...., forwards bent;
against time's timeless hours, O eternity!
...