I Want to Die While You Love Me

I Want to Die While You Love Me

I want to die while you love me
While yet you hold me fair,
While laughter lies upon my lips
And lights are in my hair.

I want to die while you love me,
And bear to that still bed
Your kisses turbulent, unspent,
To warm me when I'm dead.

I want to die while you love me,
Oh, who could care to live
Till love has nothing more to ask
And nothing more to give?

I want to die while you love me,
And never, never see
The glory of this perfect day
Grow dim or cease to be!

~ Georgia Douglas Johnson

Please Bury Me in the Library

Please Bury Me in the Library

Please bury me in the library
In the clean, well-lighted stacks
Of Novels, History, Poetry
Right next to the Paperbacks.

Where the Kids' books dance
With True Romance
And the Dictionary dozes.
Please bury me in the library
With a dozen long-stemmed proses.

Way back by a stack of Magazines,
I won't be sad too often,
If they bury me in the library
With bookworms in my coffin.

~ J. Patrick Lewis

After Love

After Love

Afterward, the compromise
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overheard, a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

~ Maxine Kumin