For My Love
by Wilda Morris
             With a line from Cempulappeyanīrā*

Spring rain penetrates Mother Earth.
Trillium, lady slippers, and forget-me-nots
burst through soil and matted leaves.

We amble among ancient cedars
and leafing birch. The apple tree
by our door wears blossoms in her hair.

You break a branch from the lilac bush,
stroke my cheek with perfumed flowers.

Like water that has rained in red fields,
we have become one.

We are ready to regenerate
the world.



*The italicized line is from ”Kuṟuntokai 40,” in Poets of the Tamil Anthologies,
ed. George L. Hart III (Princeton Library of Asian Translations; Princeton NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 54. I tried to keep the spirit of the genre
of Tamil poetry of which this poem is an example. In Tamil culture, rain is con-
sidered masculine and earth feminine, and it is the union of the two that creates
fertility.



 

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