Love Songs of the New Kingdom

Transl. by John L. Foster

Love of you is mixed deep in my vitals,

like water stirred into flour for bread,
Like simples compound in a sweet-tasting drug,
like pastry and honey mixed to perfection.

Oh, hurry to look at you love!

Be like horses charging in battle,
Like a gardener up with the sun
burning to watch his prize bud open.

High heaven causes a girl’s lovelonging.

It is like being too far from the light,
Far from the hearth of familiar arms.
It is this being so tangled in you.

***
I cannot condone, my heart, your loving
this son of a wild dog who mounted you drunk;
Yet I’ll never leave him to judgement, and beating,
or wear out my day in recrimination.
Shall I (as they tell me) club him to Syria,
cudgel the cur to Nubian exile?
Harry him to the highlands high over me,
Batter him down to the river mud?
No, not an ear for their harsh clamor!
I’ll never forswear our swift-running love!

***
I think I’ll go home and lie very still

I think I’ll go home and lie very still,

feigning terminal illness.
Then the neighbors will all troop over to stare,
my love, perhaps, among them.
How she’ll smile while the specialists
snarl in their teeth!—

she perfectly well knows what ails me.