Grace Hazard Conkling: Gulf View
“Between the striped walls of the canyon
Burns a crescent of blue water, arresting, poignant:
Jewel-blue,
soul of opals and sapphires;
Feather-blue,
stain of indigo on the peacock’s breast;
Flame-blue,
color that hovers above the copper-saturated driftwood in the beach-fire.
And the tall white poppy down the canyon
Sways against the blaze
Like a ship.”
Elizabeth Coatsworth: The Ship
““The sky is great and the land is great and the ocean is great,” said he;
“And a bird is a lovely thing in the air, and a supple fish in the sea;
And a horse is a beautiful thing to watch, running so gay and free.
“But a ship that is built of land-grown oak, with her sails in the wind,” said he,
“And who goes and comes in the very thick of the calm and storm of the sea,
Is light as a bird and swift as a fish, and like a horse runs free!””
Grace Stone Coates: The Intruder
“Across my book your hand augustly reaches—
Thrusts it away.
I turn impatient to the window, watching
The tossed trees’ play,
March sunshine glinting on a chilly rain-pool
That snow-banks frame.
A lusty wind comes gusting on its errand
And names your name.
Captive, defeated, having striven I yield me
To thought awhile;
Letting the sunlight on the roughened waters
Bear me your smile;
Hearing the mischief-making wind that named you
Question afresh
If spirit find in spirit full contentment
Only through flesh.”
Muriel Ciolkowska: Snow
“THIS night my body is an offering—
I am carried to you.
Years I was near you
And you were far.
But tonight of all nights
Was not the night
To be parted.
I would fain go forth
And seek you,
And sink down by you,
As the flakes falling outside
Sink into the cushioned ground.
And that which is me
Is also a field
Glowing and boundless.”
Elizabeth Gibson Cheyne: A Poet to his Poems
“You are born; you are no more mine:
I have let you go forever.
Demoniac or divine,
You shall sail by sea and river;
You shall walk by road and track;
You shall fly through wind and weather;
But nevermore come back,
That our hearts may laugh together. ”
Louise Adele Carter: One Listens
“I heard Death singing.
Lone was the darkening way;
The song was a glad song, ringing
Far, faint and gay;
But pale poppies were clinging
To the feet that went that way.
Gay, faint bugles of Death
Airily blowing;
Poppies of strange, cold breath
Frailly growing;
And around and above and beneath
A faint wind blowing.
A weak wind wearily blowing,
Like a blown winding-sheet,
That wrapped me in its dread flowing
From face to feet;
A wind that seemed as if blowing
Between the earth and my feet.
Far—farther than wonder
Could follow, or dreams,
The sunken sun lay under
The furthest streams;
Far beyond longing or wonder,
Or dreams.
Death’s song like a nightingale’s cry
Through that lone dark,
Pierced it, wildly and high;
And my heart said, Hark!—
’Tis the nightingale’s cry!
Nay, said my soul, the lark!
But poppies impeded my treading;
Sleep and great fear fell upon me—
What dews of what cold shedding
Were these shed upon me?
Behind me no way for treading,
No way beyond me.
And gay, faint bugles of Death
Airily blowing;
Poppies of strange cold breath
Frailly growing;
And around and above and beneath
A faint wind blowing.”
Mabel D. Cary: A Spring Song
“Smell the sweet wind
From far woodlands—
How it comes
Blowing
Soft breezes,
Sharp breezes,
In clear pureness
From high hilltops!
Feel the wild wind
In the city streets—
How it comes
Bearing
New strongness,
Fresh gladness,
In light laughter
To a wearying world!
Hark you, free wind,
Tapping at my window
As you go
Singing
Glad songs,
Mad songs,
New love take to
Mon camarade—mon chéri!”
Nancy Campbell: The Apple-Tree
“I saw the archangels in my apple-tree last night,
I saw them like great birds in the starlight—
Purple and burning blue, crimson and shining white.
And each to each they tossed an apple to and fro,
And once I heard their laughter gay and low;
And yet I felt no wonder that it should be so.
But when the apple came one time to Michael’s lap
I heard him say: “The mysteries that enwrap
The earth and fill the heavens can be read here, mayhap.”
Then Gabriel spoke: “I praise the deed, the hidden thing.”
“The beauty of the blossom of the spring
I praise,” cried Raphael. Uriel: “The wise leaves I sing.”
And Michael: “I will praise the fruit, perfected, round,
Full of the love of God, herein being bound
His mercies gathered from the sun and rain and ground.”
So sang they till a small wind through the branches stirred,
And spoke of coming dawn; and at its word
Each fled away to heaven, winged like a bird.”
Alice Ormond Campbell
“Men call me Longing; and I come to you
To lure and taunt you in the graying dawn
Or breathless even, when, the sun withdrawn,
The shallow moon hangs empty in the blue.
Chill spring is mine, when eager winds pursue
The tree-boughs traced with chary fringe of tawn,
And trenchant blades fresh-pierce the russet lawn,—
Mute questions asked, despaired, and asked anew.
I am that hunger which all mad Youth is,
Fretful and faint, with fever-burning eye;
Its thin arms, dread with sweet concavities,
Reached out to wisps that beckon and deny—
Strange unresolving chords, and ironies
That stir, excite, yet never satisfy.
”
Hazel Rawson Cades: Feel of Brambles
“She will bear him children with straight backs and sturdy limbs,
Clear-eyed children with untroubled minds.
Mine would have been brown things, questioners—
With little hoofs, I think;
Lovers of wind and rain
And twisted brambly paths over the hills.
But he was afraid—afraid of the brown-hoofed ones;
And more afraid that sometimes,
As we grew old together,
I would slip away from him to the hills;
Where he—because of gout, or girth, or civic dignity—
Could not come after.
He need not have been troubled:
Long before that I should have lost the feel of brambles.”
Dorothy Butts: The Parade
“Faces, laughing and torch-lit,
Passing and passing—
Laughing and torch-lit and passing!
Voices, crying and shouting,
Dying and dying—
Crying and shouting and dying!
Drums, beating and thumping,
Retreating, retreating—
Beating and thumping, retreating!
Gone! There remains but the heat
Of the August night-wind
Blowing a leaf down the street. ”
Kate Buss: The Dead Pecos Town
“Above the steep arroyo of russet running straight with rose
The Pecos pueblo sleeps—
A mound of dust timbered with bones.
Three silver yuccas flower on the grave.
For headstone, cut by frost and all its edges shriveled by the desert heat,
A mission leans against the wide still sky.
I too am watching with time.
Where I stand, the crusted gravel cracks
And ghosts of seven centuries are stirred.
Shards of painted pots lie like mosaic on a shattered floor.
A frost-white shin-bone rattles down the slope,
Strikes a fellow and finds the plain.
Jaws are set and dead mouths smile—
Bones of martyrs, pioneers.
Feet that once were dancing lie with rain gods,
And thin broken spears.”
Sarah-Margaret Brown: From a Chicago "L"
“The great gray houses walk along
Sombrely and slow,
Weary in the dusk,
In a dragging row.
They are very tired,
Heart-broken and old;
They seem to shudder as they pass,
The winter wind is cold.”
Alice Brown: Vision
“Mother, I have come home to you
Out of my sore distress.
Mother, how beautiful you are
In your dull working dress!
“Then if you see me so, dear child,”
I heard my mother say,
“See, too, the beauty of the soul
In her worn dress of clay.””
Louise Brooke: Brick-dust
“It’s just a heap of ruin,
A drunken brick carouse—
This thing my spirit grew in
That once was called a house.
An attic where I scribbled
Through baking summer days,
While street-pianos nibbled
At the patient Marseillaise.
The spider-landlord squatted
In a web of dinner-smells,
And people slowly rotted
In little gossip-hells.
I hated all I learned there—
And yet I could have cried
For a little oil I burned there,
A little dream that died. ”
Grace Hodsdon Boutelle: It Vanished
“CAN it matter to you and me
Where the hurrying years have fled,
Since they told me you ceased to be,
Since the day when they called you dead?
Death? As a cobweb spun
By night on the dew-drenched grass,
It vanished … I saw you pass
With your face to the rising sun.”
Susan Boogher: Alchemy
“Since I have loved you
Every man I pass
Goes by me with some hint of you:
Some windy grace
Of your swift movement through the crowd;
Some similarity of up-flung brow
That lifts me with the thrill of mountains;
Some glance of eyes, like yours,
That whisper phraseless things….
Since I have loved you
Every man I pass
Goes by me with some hint of you….
Since I have loved you
Are you all men?
And has love made
All men
You?”
Amy Bonner: Revelations
“Crystals of light,
Like raindrops,
Beat down about my head;
And I kneel low to receive them
Reverently.”
Louise Bogan: Elders
“At night the moon shakes the bright dice of the water;
And the elders, their flower light as broken snow upon the bush,
Repeat the circle of the moon.
Within the month
Black fruit breaks from the white flower.
The black-wheeled berries turn
Weighing the boughs over the road.
There is no harvest.
Heavy to withering, the black wheels bend
Ripe for the mouths of chance lovers,
Or birds.
Twigs show again in the quick cleavage of season and season.
The elders sag over the powdery road-bank,
As though they bore, and it were too much,
The seed of the year beyond the year.”
Helen Louise Birch: Up in the Hills
“The earth smells old and warm and mellow, and all things lie at peace.
I too serenely lie here under the white-oak tree, and know the splendid flight of hours all blue and gay, sun-drenched and still.
The dogs chase rabbits through the hazel-brush;
I hear now close at hand their eager cries, now swift receding into the distance, leaving a-trail behind them in the clear sweet air shrill bursts of joy.
There’s something almost drowsy in that waning clamor;
It brings the stillness nearer and a sense of being bodily at one with the old warm earth,
Blessedly at one with the fragrant laughing sun-baked earth,
At one with its sly delightful wicked old laughter. ”
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