One Cigarette Poem by Edwin Morgan
One Cigarette
No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker's tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I'll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.
I hear the very ash sigh down among the flowers of brass. good one.
This is not only a wonderfully evocative piece of writing but it also takes me back … my English lecturer gave this to us for our English Higher exam. It took me on a journey then, and it all floods back now!
A cigarette burning held into the fingers and the poet recollecting about love, love gotten, love lost, the last kiss lingering over and the imagery taking time to exhaust. An outstanding love poem like the one written by Edmund Spenser's One Day I Wrote Her Name and Thomas Wyatt's Forget Me Not. A very dramatic poem like that of Robert Browning's The Last Ride Together. The beauty is in the reference of tobacco lips. How is it maddening!
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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3/22/2023 4:50:50 AM # 1.0.0.1112
(without cigarette on fire i can still smell you much more if you put your lips to mine) very realistic poem.