More Poetry for Poetry Month

Let's keep adding to our collection, shall we?

This is an untitled love poem, by Isaac Ibn Khalfon (translated by Raymond Scheindlin, from his collection Wine, Women and Death), a poet of the Golden Age of Spain. A good poem considering the season: spring, new love, and Passover, when we read the Song of Songs (or the Song of Solomon), one of the best-loved love poems. And who hasn't, especially as a teenager, played the role of the hapless suitor?

I skip like a gazelle at passion's call
To see my love, secluded in her hall.
Arriving there, I find my darling in,
With mother, father, brothers--all her kin.
I take one look and grimly shrink away,
As if she didn't matter anyway.
them I fear; but her, my love, I mourn
like a mother mourning her first born.