Noli Me Tangere

NOLI ME TANGERE

I would be more tender
than the tenderest lover
to you the sharer of my wild compare,

to you who’d bathe me with your hands
as I do you with words.

I would put no limit,
no cutting point
to this my combined love,
but you say, “Noli me tangere!”

How can I “touch you not”
when there is but one sense?
We touch with word and eye and mouth.

We cannot be without touching.
Can the wind blow without touching?
Do sounds upon our ears, our skin,
our minds impinge without touch?

I’d rather the snow would never fall
than touch you “only once.”

In the snowless world,
there is no once
but only “ever.”

Never is better
than not to love freely.,

unpatterned as a storm
unsevering as the waves,
unlimited as the wind.

Touch me not
for I am rimeless motion
born of primal flame.

Noli me tangere.

Notes on "Noli Me Tangere"

Stanley Barkan insists that poems should not need explanation and cannot have an explanation. They just are. In this case, it may or may not help to know that "Noli me tangere" was Latin for "Do not touch me," a translation of the words of Jesus Christ to Mary Magdalene following his resurrection (John 20:17). In the original Greek, it evidently meant, "Don't seize hold of me" - for Jesus had to continue on his mission. It is also the name of a novel by Filipino author Jose Rizal, and of a movie. But in this poem it alludes to a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, about Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, "Whoso list to hunt:"

...

   And graven with diamonds in letters plain

There is written, her fair neck round about:

   Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,

   And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

Stanley Barkan is a passionate proponent of cross-cultural communications.