Speak Love | seven songs for medium voice & guitar by Frank A. Wallace

Song
Were I a bird I would wing to thee
Were I a lark I would sing to thee
Were I a star I would shine for thee
Were I a lover I’d pine for thee.

Were I the breeze I would blow for thee,
Were I the rose I would grow for thee,
Were I a wave I would break for thee,
Were I a heart I would ache for thee.

Were I the wind I would sigh for thee,
Were I a hero I’d die for thee,
None of these gifts can I give to thee,
Bid me, dear, only to live for thee.

Absence
Tonight I cannot see your eyes
Smile sweet in-to my own
The last faint ray of daylight dies
I sit in dark alone
Yet through yon stars that brightly shine
I know your heart is seeking mine.

Tonight I cannot hear your call
Across the deadening years
That rise between a giant wall
That yields not to my fears.
Yet in the sobbing of the sea
I know your spirit speaks to me.

Tonight I may not feel the touch
Of clinging fingertips
Tonight my heart yearns over much
With hungering for your lips
Yet love may bid time backward roll
This hour I clasp you soul to soul.

Song
What light may e’er relieve the gloom
Through which men blindly grope?
I looked into your eyes, my sweet,
And found that light was Hope.

What power of men or e’en of gods
May rend the bonds of death?
I looked into your heart, my sweet,
And felt that power was Faith.

What truth may lift our sordid lives
From earth to heaven above?
I looked into your soul, my sweet,
And knew that truth was Love.

Death in Life
If while your love were still my very own,
Cold Death had laid his hand upon your heart,
I would have bowed my head and made no moan,
Scorning a power too weak our souls to part.

I would have longed for voice and lips and hands,
Yet with the wanderingnight winds from the sea,
Our souls had still embraced in mystic lands,
Known only to Love’s holy sympathy.

Such sacred grief were blessedness…Tonight
Mine is the anguish of a different lot:
To know your lips as sweet, your eyes as bright,
And, searching for your soul— to find it not!

Isolation
When I was but a child and knew not pain,
One day you clasped me closely to your breast,
And on my cheek your lips convulsive pressed,
While o’er my face the hot tears fell like rain.

That hour was long ago, Then why today
When years have given me my rightful part
In the soul’s sorrow, [Why, Why] do you close your heart
To love, and smiling, turn your face away?

Twilight
We spoke no word, nor did we look again
At one another. Down yon purple steeps
The glow of evening faded; from the deeps
Uprose the sullen roaring of the main.
A sudden wind swept o’er the misty plain,
Then?silence and the stars; and lo, a cry,
Voiceless, as a soul in agony,
Rang through the stillness, while our hearts with pain
Throbbed wildly through the darkness, as a clod
Roused by Spring’s life; then?nothing.
Though no word
We spoke, nor looked again, [at one another] we silent heard
Through all our being ring the voice of God.

Dawn
I strayed alone through realms of night,
And waiting hopeless for the dawn,
I thought before the break of morn
To see afar a beam of light?
And lo, the star I thought to rise,
I found your eyes.

I wandered through a sunless land
Along the copper streakèd sea
That hurled itself in mastery
Across life’s barren waste of sand,
And as I longed for Spring the while,
I found your smile.

I gazed into the jaws of Hell
And there I read that sin and shame
Are life’s true masters, and the name
Of friendship false?my idols fell,
But when I fain would curse life’s whole,
I found your soul.