Two Birthdays

Your birthday, sweetheart, is my birthday too,
For, had you not been born,
I who began to live beholding you
Up early as the morn,
That day in June beside the rose-hung stream,
Had never lived at all -
We stood, do you remember? in a dream
There by the water-fall.

You were as still as all the other flowers
Under the morning's spell;
Sudden two lives were one, and all things "ours" -
How we can never tell.
Surely it had been fated long ago -
What else, dear, could we think?
It seemed that we had stood for ever so,
There by the river's brink.

And all the days that followed seemed as days
Lived side by side before,
Strangely familiar all your looks and ways,
The very frock you wore;
Nothing seemed strange, yet all divinely new;
Known to your finger tips,
Yet filled with wonder every part of you,
Your hair, your eyes, your lips.

The wise in love say love was ever thus
Through endless Time and Space,
Heart linked to heart, beloved, as with us,
Only one face - one face -
Our own to love, however fair the rest;
'Tis so true lovers are,
For ever breast to breast,
On - on - from star to star.