After Ronsard V

When you are old and sitting by the fire
you will doze over books of poetry
until you read these lines about you and cry,
“ How the poet raved about my beauty!”

Your house will be empty then, your children
Grown, your husband senile, but when my name
parts your lips you’ll smile, oh to have been
so loved, to have been immortalized by desire.

I will be dead, just a few bones crumbling
under the myrtle, while you will be warm,
cozy in your chair, but wistful and wishing
you hadn’t rejected me that summer,

so love me now, before your loveliness
withers, life is a rose, then nothingness.