Elsa Gidlow
Watch my Love in sleep:
Is she not beautiful
As a young flower at night
Weary and glad with dew?
Pale curved body
That I have kissed too much,
Warm with slumber’s flush;
Breasts like mounded snow,
Too small for children’s mouths;
Lips a red spring bud
My love will bring to bloom.
How restlessly she moves!
She, no more than a child,
Stirs like a woman troubled
With guilt of secret sins.
Twin furtive tears
Glide from the shadows,
Her eyes’ shadowed blue.
Her dreaming must be sad.
What grief to watching love
That it is impotent,
For all its reckless strength,
When the sleep gates close.
Published in On a Grey Thread, 1930.
Elsa Gidlow (29 December 1898 – 8 June 1986) was a British-born, Canadian-American poet, freelance journalist, philosopher and humanitarian. She is best known for writing On a Grey Thread (1923), the first volume of openly lesbian love poetry published in North America.