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The Spike: or, Victoria College Review 1912

My Lady of Tears

page 13

My Lady of Tears.

I look on thy face fair in sorrow,
Tho' fretted and stained with thy tears,
And worn with the troubles of morrows
Born back m the grayness of years;
On thine eyes that are saddened and listless
With sadness their sorrow endears;
And I love thee with longing resistless,
My beautiful Lady of Tears.

Uncared and unclaimed are thy tresses,
Flung careless, unfettered and free,
Forgetful of given caresses,
Unmindful of beauties that be.
But thy face, with its sorrow and sadness,
Knows knowledge sprung out of the years,
So I love thee in grief and in gladness,
My beautiful Lady of Tears.

The hopes that were thine and thine only,
The joys that were thine to abide,
Lie shattered and scattered and lonely,
As wreckage borne far on the tide.
And the flood of the hours of to-morrows
Bears grief and fulfilment of fears,
As waifs to the shore of thy sorrows,
My beautiful Lady of Tears.

In a season of sadness and laughter,
Of joys and of hopes and of dreams,
Forgotten of years that come after,
Unnumbered of memory's gleams;
When Youth cherished Joy as a brother,
A whisper, a breath in mine ears—
And I knew that my love was another,
My beautiful Lady of Tears.

But a breeze that has blown through roses
Remembers the scent of their bloom,
Afar when the darkness encloses
Rose-garden, and roses, and tomb;

page 14

Though the sweetness is lost ere the rapture
Of summer and roses appears
From the days that are fled past recapture,
My sorrowful Lady of Tears.

And the breath with its burden of sadness,
Its mists and its grief and its pain,
Breathed something of hopes and of gladness,
Of roses that bloom not again,
Of yesterday's days and its morrows,
Of yesterday's hopes and its fears;
But I loved thee because of thy sorrows,
Thou beautiful Lady of Tears.

Piri Kerei.