the poets' muse is one

On scattered conversation trails, yesterday my friend and I wandered into the region of poetry. She introduced me to Nizar Qabbani, a contemporary Syrian poet who--surprise, surprise--wrote about love. The following is titled, In the Summer:

In the summer
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you
Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.*

Today I have continued solitarily hiking in the same terrain and enjoying the vistas of love poetry in various languages. The landscape contains this excerpt from Pablo Neruda's Soneto XVII:

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde,
te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo:
así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,

sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres,
tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,
tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

Or, here is one of his in English translation, from Lovely One:

There are countries, there are rivers,
In your eyes,
My country is your eyes,
I walk through them,
They light the world
Through which I walk,
Lovely one.

And a final excerpt from e e cummings, one of my favorite poets:

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

My wanderings also took me to a lookout, where I found a Finnish contribution. You must also visit this lookout. Just do it. And have a nice trek.

*Translated by B. Frangieh And C. Brown