Sol 5.6

  1. Long have I borne the length of this estrangement,

    and kept reaching out through your rebuff, never repaying you in kind.

  2. Come, tell me what you will say when

    you bring your case against me before Justice.

  3. Was it for some preoccupation that I severed my bonds with you,

    or out of weariness? Yet true affection never becomes wearisome.

  4. If weariness were in the nature of the freeborn—

    —then every loyal man would weary of his pledge.

  5. May we never lose you! Where is the cheerful grace we once knew—

    —in you, and the generosity that makes importunate pleading needless?

  6. Where are those qualities—gentle as water,

    or like the breeze? What is choicest wine beside them?

  7. Do not heed, against me, an enemy who has wronged you;

    long have I opposed the partisans of discord.

  8. My only fault—God knows it, and all mankind—

    in loving you is nothing but my excess.

  9. Here I am, afflicted and sick: would it please—

    —you that I suffer while another is my healer?

  10. Had I known for certain that your judgment was unsound—

    —I would have set it right with the finest redress.

  11. Do not leave me to anyone but yourself, for I am

    the blade of your arm; my harm lies in being cast aside.

  12. Prose failed to encompass my needs,

    so I lodged them in the breasts of rhymed verse.

Sol 5.6