10/25/00:
Robert Frost
The Lockless Door
IT went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.
I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.
But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.
Back over the sill
I bade a “Come in”
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.
So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.
4/11/00:
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Dream
LOVE, if I weep it will not matter,
And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it,
But it is good to feel you there.
Love, in my sleep I dreamed of waking,—
White and awful the moonlight reached
Over the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,
There was a shutter loose,—it screeched!
Swung in the wind,—and no wind blowing!—
I was afraid, and turned to you,
Put out my hand to you for comfort,—
And you were gone! Cold, cold as dew,
Under my hand the moonlight lay!
Love, if you laugh I shall not care,
But if I weep it will not matter,—
Ah, it is good to feel you there!
1/20/00:
W. B. Yeats
A Deep-sworn Vow
OTHERS because you did not keep
That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine;
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine,
Suddenly I meet your face.
12/30/99:
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Caged Skylark
AS a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage
Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells—
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—
Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,
But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.
8/11/98:
Samuel T. Coleridge
Psyche
The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul's fair emblem, and its only name--
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of mortal life !--For in this earthly frame
Ours is the reptile's lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.
7/14/98:
Emily Schwenke
unrequited
shallow breath seething through tight teeth
tighter still, the eyes, determined and undeterred
steadfast, unflinching from their target
then a lip quivers and all is lost
that single tear
betrayer of the strong,
collapser of proverbial brick walls
takes her to the ground
falling faster
quick and hot, searing the flesh
sealing her misery
ashamed and angry
swallows them back
gagging on the bitterness
choking back the regret
finds her composure
and faces her tormentor
6/8/98:
Siegfried Sasson
Dryad's
WHEN meadows are grey with the morn
In the dusk of the woods it is night:
The oak and the birch and the pine
War with the glimmer of light.
Dryads brown as the leaf
Move in the gloom of the glade;
When meadows are grey with the morn
Dim night in the wood has delayed.
The cocks that crow to the land
Are faint and hollow and shrill:
Dryads brown as the leaf
Whisper, and hide, and are still.
4/13/98:
Walt Whitman
A Child's Amaze
SILENT and amazed, even when a little boy,
I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements,
As contending against some being or influence.
4/6/98:
Patrick MacGill
Death and the Fairies
Before I joined the Army
I lived in Donegal,
Where every night the Fairies
Would hold their carnival.
But now I'm out in Flanders,
Where men like wheat-ears fall,
And it's Death and not the Fairies
Who is holding carnival.
2/23/98:
D. H. Lawrence
The End
I could have put you in my heart,
If but I could have wrapped you in myself,
How glad I should have been!
And now the chart
Of memory unrolls again to me
The course of our journey here, before we had to part.
And oh, that you had never, never been
Some of your selves, my love, that some
Of your several faces I had never seen!
And still they come before me, and they go,
And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene.
And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night,
And have not any longer any hope
To heal the suffering, or make requite
For all your life of asking and despair,
I own that some of me is dead to-night.
2/16/98:
William Butler Yeats
To a Child Dancing in the Wind
DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?
Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn'd?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.
O you will take whatever's offered
And dream that all the world's a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.
2/9/98:
Sylvia Plath
The Rival
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,
And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon, too, abases her subjects
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.
02/02/98:
Oscar Wilde
Her Voice
THE wild bee reels from bough to bough
With his furry coat and his gauzy wing.
Now in a lily-cup, and now
Setting a jacinth bell a-swing,
In his wandering;
Sit closer love: it was here I trow
I made that vow,
Swore that two lives should be like one
As long as the sea-gull loved the sea,
As long as the sunflower sought the sun,--
It shall be, I said, for eternity
'Twixt you and me!
Dear friend, those times are over and done,
Love's web is spun.
Look upward where the poplar trees
Sway and sway in the summer air,
Here in the valley never a breeze
Scatters the thistledown, but there
Great winds blow fair
From the mighty murmuring mystical seas,
And the wave-lashed leas.
Look upward where the white gull screams,
What does it see that we do not see?
Is that a star? or the lamp that gleams
On some outward voyaging argosy,--
Ah! can it be
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
How sad it seems.
Sweet, there is nothing left to say
But this, that love is never lost,
Keen winter stabs the breasts of May
Whose crimson roses burst his frost,
Ships tempest-tossed
Will find a harbour in some bay,
And so we may.
And there is nothing left to do
But to kiss once again, and part,
Nay, there is nothing we should rue,
I have my beauty,--you your Art,
Nay, do not start,
One world was not enough for two
Like me and you.
1/26/98:
Oscar Wilde
My Voice
WITHIN this restless, hurried, modern world
We took our hearts' full pleasure--You and I,
And now the white sails of our ship are furled,
And spent the lading of our argosy.
Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,
For very weeping is my gladness fled,
Sorrow hath paled my lip's vermilion,
And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.
But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
10/20/97:
Emily Dickinson
Heart, we will forget him!
Heart, we will forget him!
You and I, to-night!
You may forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.
When you have done, pray tell me,
That I my thoughts may dim;
Haste! lest while you 're lagging,
I may remember him!
8/11/97:
Maya Angelou
Recovery
A Last love,
proper in conclusion,
should snip the wings
forbidding further flight.
But I, now,
reft of that confusion,
am lifted up
and speeding toward the light.
7/21/97:
Seumas O'Sullivan
Praise
Dear, they are praising your beauty,
The grass and the sky:
The sky in a silence of wonder,
The grass in a sigh.
I too would sing for your praising,
Dearest, had I
Speech as the whispering grass,
Or the silent sky.
These have an art for the praising
Beauty so high.
Sweet, you are praised in a silence,
Sung in a sigh.
7/14/97:
Thomas Hardy
Going and Staying
The moving sun-shapes on the spray,
The sparkles where the brook was flowing,
Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May,--
These were the things we wished would stay;
But they were going.
Seasons of blankness as of snow,
The silent bleed of a world decaying,
The moan of multitudes in woe,--
These were the things we wished would go;
But they were staying.
7/7/97:
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Moonrise
I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, ' in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe ' of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, ' lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, ' of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, ' entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, ' unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, ' eyelid and eyelid of slumber.
6/30/97:
Li Po (AD 701-762)
On Kusa Terrace
Translated by Rewi Alley, Li Bai: 200 Poems, Hong Kong, 1980
The old gardens of Kusu Terrace
are a wilderness, yet the willows
that remain still put out new branches;
lasses gathering water chestnuts
sing so loudly and with such
clarity, that the feeling of spring
returns to us; but where once stood
the palace of the King of Wu, now
only the moon over the
west river once shone on
the lovely ladies there.
6/23/97:
William Butler Yeats
To my Heart, bidding it have no Fear
Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;
Remember the wisdom out of the old days:
Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,
And the winds that blow through the starry ways,
Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the proud, majestical multitude.
6/16/97:
Emily Dickinson
With a Flower
When roses cease to bloom, dear,
And violets are done,
When bumble-bees in solemn flight
Have passed beyond the sun,
The hand that paused to gather
Upon this summer's day
Will idle lie, in Auburn,--
Then take my flower, pray!
6/9/97:
Edward Thomas
If I Should Ever By Chance
If I should ever by chance grow rich
I'll buy Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo, and Lapwater,
And let them all to my elder daughter.
The rent I shall ask of her will be only
Each year's first violets, white and lonely,
The first primroses and orchises--
She must find them before I do, that is.
But if she finds a blossom on furze
Without rent they shall all for ever be hers,
Codham, Cockridden, and Childerditch,
Roses, Pyrgo and Lapwater,--
I shall give them all to my elder daughter.
6/2/97:
Robert Louis Stevenson
Requiem
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
5/19/97:
Carl Sandburg
Haunts
There are places I go when I am strong.
One is a marsh pool where I used to go
with a long-ear hound-dog.
One is a wild crabapple tree; I was there
a moonlight night with a girl.
The dog is gone; the girl is gone; I go to these
places when there is no other place to go.
5/12/97:
Emily Dickinson
He touched me, so I live to know
He touched me, so I live to know
That such a day, permitted so,
I groped upon his breast.
It was a boundless place to me,
And silenced, as the awful sea
Puts minor streams to rest.
And now, I 'm different from before,
As if I breathed superior air,
Or brushed a royal gown;
My fee, too, that had wandered so,
My gypsy face transfigured now
To tenderer renown.
5/5/97:
Robert Graves
A Pinch of Salt
When a dream is born in you
With a sudden clamorous pain,
When you know the dream is true
And lovely, with no flaw nor stain,
O then, be careful, or with sudden clutch
You'll hurt the delicate thing you prize so much.
Dreams are like a bird that mocks,
Flirting the feathers of his tail.
When you seize at the salt-box
Over the hedge you'll see him sail.
Old birds are neither caught with salt nor chaff:
They watch you from the apple bough and laugh.
Poet, never chase the dream.
Laugh yourself and turn away.
Mask your hunger, let it seem
Small matter if he come or stay;
But when he nestles in your hand at last,
Close up your fingers tight and hold him fast.
4/28/97:
Robert Frost
Fragmentary Blue
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
4/21/97:
Emily Schwenke
thespian sex
calmly, cautiously, taking a breath
reaching tentatively for the curtain's caress
soft velvet smolders desires
engulfing, soothing, harshly scalding
eyes closed, head down
delicate sigh
timid, shy and scared
anxious, lonely, hesitant, despaired
not crying, not daring
but suddenly screaming
spinning and shouting
soaring and laughing
miserably, exultantly joyous
quixotic magic of emotions
4/14/97:
Jonathan Price
A Considered Reply to a Child
'I love you,' you said between two mouthfuls of pudding.
But not funny; I didn't want to laugh at all.
Rolling three years' experience in a ball,
You nudged it friendlily across the table.
A stranger, almost, I was flattered - no kidding.
It's not every day I hear a thing like that;
And when I do my answer's never pat.
I'm about nine times your age, ten times less able
To say - what you said; incapable of unloading
Plonk at someone's feet, like a box of bricks,
A declaration. When I try, it sticks
Like fish-bones in my throat; my eyes tingle.
What's called 'passion', you'll learn, may become 'overriding'.
But not in me it doesn't: I'm that smart,
I can give everything and keep my heart.
Kisses are kisses. No need for souls to mingle.
Bed's bed, what's more, and you'd say it's meant for sleeping;
And, believe me, you'd be absolutely right.
With luck you'll never lie awake all night,
Someone beside you (rather like 'crying') weeping.
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