Friday, July 02, 2004

Never enough kisses

Give me a kiss, add to that kiss a score;
Then to that twenty, add a hundred more:
A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on,
To make that thousand up a million.
Treble that million, and when that is done,
Let's kiss afresh, as when we first begun.

-- Robert Herrick

Let us live, my Lesbia, and let us love,
and let us judge all the rumors of the old men
to be worth just one penny!
The suns are able to fall and rise:
When that brief light has fallen for us,
we must sleep a never ending night.
Give me a thousand kisses, then another hundred,
then another thousand, then a second hundred,
then yet another thousand more, then another hundred.
Then, when we have made many thousands,
we will mix them all up so that we don't know,
and so that no one can be jealous of us when he finds out
how many kisses we have shared.
..
You ask, Lesbia, how many kissings
of you are enough and to spare for me.
As great as the number of the sands of Lybia
to be found in silphium-bearing Cyrene
between Jove's torrid oracle
and the sacred tomb of legendary Battus;
or as many the stars which in the silence of night
behold the stealthy loves of mankind:
so many kisses to kiss you with
would be enough and spare for love-crazed Catullus,
too many for the inquisitive to be able to count
or bewitch with their evil tongues.

-- Catullus
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