FIRE AND ICE
To my lamenting heart, you have become a burning flame;
You both scorch with your heat and bite sharper than the bitterest frost.
Like a nightingale entranced by the rose of your cheek,
I burn in the fire of your love, then am cut down by your icy chill.
While no moon of solace rises upon the night of my separation,
You cast burning embers into my breast, yet shroud my soul in ice.
With a single breath of grace, you revive my very life;
With a single glance of wrath, you destroy me a thousand times over.
Like a moth, I circled ceaselessly around the candle of your beauty;
Yet you are a breath resembling a winter that freezes upon my very sigh.
Neither has the fever of passion ever abandoned me in this love,
Nor is it merely ice that will not thaw; it is you—always you.
At times my heart burns within me like a city turned to ash;
At times it freezes solid as stone, like a wasteland lost outside of time.
Here I remain, wretched and helpless, caught between fire and water;
One side of me is an ocean of flame, the other, a winter hard as stone.
Oh, you charmer whose beauty stirs up a very apocalypse!
You are a being too vast to be contained by any season, or defined by any single state.
I have turned to dust for your sake, yet this soul shall never rise again;
For you are both the fire that consumes me, and the eternal ice that holds me fast.
R