Now I'd like to try to read a poem that I've never
read to anybody before.
Well as a matter of fact, I translated
the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, into my own situation.
In the Song of Songs, there's an enjoining
to come away from the city to a place of orchards and plants
and big sky and nice soil and quiet love.
I applied this to my situation at the time.
So I will now take my translation of,
and I do it verse by verse, of song 4 of the Song of Songs.
Look, you are beautiful, my love.
Look, you are beautiful.
Eyes of doves wink in your hair, you
are fair as the doves from the enlit mountains.
Your teeth, too, shine at me, somewhere smiling to me.
Your lips are pink, the line of them bringing me to you.
The call from you whispers in my ear.
Your temples, delicate sight of skin under restless moving
of your hair.
In the night, your neck takes light
as ivory reflected in pools and jewels wink there.
1,000 of them moving.
Your two breasts are alive and young to my touch,
as young deer together in the air of a friendly forest.
And you have flowers on you.
Lilies.
Till the sun suggests a brightness upon us
and the shadows move quickly away,
I will walk in the forest of lilies in the morning.
Look, you are beautiful, my love.
There is no flaw upon thee.
Come with me from Vancouver, my wife.
Look from hills over Okanagan, flowered Valley of Glacier Cut.
For you have ravished me away, my heart, my wife.
You have ravished me away with one of your green eyes,
with one jewel of your neck.
Look, your love is beautiful, my wife.
Better than the wine I have tasted, better than the spices,
all their scents.
Look, your lips, my wife, like the honeycomb.
Honey and milk tasted under your tongue.
The scent of your dress like Okanagan in spring.
Your scent, you are a garden enclosed, my wife.
A spring enclosed, a fountain sealed.
Your plants are an orchard of ripe apples, peaches,
and plums.
Plums and pears, plump cherries with trees
of blossoms crazy out of thyme.
Apricots, blackberries, currants,
and grapes intermingled with spices.
A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters and streams
from Okanagan.
North wind awake blow South down the Valley.
Below here upon my garden flow the spices over all the land.
With you I will enter my garden and we will live therein.