Three Ghazals

by Jeffrey Burghauser (June 2020)

The Poet, Doris Lindo Lewis, 1930

 

 

[1]

 

“What shall I my lady give?” Your trembling.

“Tell me what a person’s for.” For trembling.

 

“When did you last know what anguish signified?”

When the stars were neither still nor trembling.

 

Yours must be the hand that keeps score, trembling.

 

 
[2]

 

Smelling smoke and hearing all the din between.

 

Loci for my frantic heart to spin between.

 

Here’s the model. Here’s her painted counterpart.

There’s an acre of sequential kin between.

 

A dense, chthonic cladogram of tin between.

 

Show me pairs among the ocean’s fabulous

Sinews only fit to fit a fin between.

 

Thoughtful Poet, promise that your words be so

Mason’d that you cannot fit a sin between.

 

 

[3]

 

Damson plums are slowly stewed in rosewater.

Darkness offers a divine cuisine of pain.

 

Poet, you’ve survéyed the whole of History

From this Mughal-crimson mezzanine of pain.

 

 

 

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