Written by
Russell Edson |
Out of nothing there comes a time called childhood, which
is simply a path leading through an archway called
adolescence.
A small town there, past the arch called youth.
Soon, down the road, where one almost misses the life
lived beyond the flower, is a small shack labeled, you.
And it is here the future lives in the several postures of
arm on windowsill, cheek on this; elbows on knees, face in
the hands; sometimes the head thrown back, eyes staring into
the ceiling .
.
.
This into nothing down the long day's arc .
.
.
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Written by
Amy Lowell |
Now what in the name of the sun and the stars
Is the meaning of this most unholy of wars?
Do men find life so full of humour and joy
That for want of excitement they smash up the toy?
Fifteen millions of soldiers with popguns and horses
All bent upon killing, because their "of courses"
Are not quite the same.
All these men by the ears,
And nine nations of women choking with tears.
It is folly to think that the will of a king
Can force men to make ducks and drakes of a thing
They value, and life is, at least one supposes,
Of some little interest, even if roses
Have not grown up between one foot and the other.
What a marvel bureaucracy is, which can smother
Such quite elementary feelings, and tag
A man with a number, and set him to wag
His legs and his arms at the word of command
Or the blow of a whistle! He's certainly damned,
Fit only for mince-meat, if a little gold lace
And an upturned moustache can set him to face
Bullets, and bayonets, and death, and diseases,
Because some one he calls his Emperor, pleases.
If each man were to lay down his weapon, and say,
With a click of his heels, "I wish you Good-day,"
Now what, may I ask, could the Emperor do?
A king and his minions are really so few.
Angry? Oh, of course, a most furious Emperor!
But the men are so many they need not mind his temper, or
The dire results which could not be inflicted.
With no one to execute sentence, convicted
Is just the weak wind from an old, broken bellows.
What lackeys men are, who might be such fine fellows!
To be killing each other, unmercifully,
At an order, as though one said, "Bring up the tea.
"
Or is it that tasting the blood on their jaws
They lap at it, drunk with its ferment, and laws
So patiently builded, are nothing to drinking
More blood, any blood.
They don't notice its stinking.
I don't suppose tigers do, fighting cocks, sparrows,
And, as to men -- what are men, when their marrows
Are running with blood they have gulped; it is plain
Such excellent sport does not recollect pain.
Toll the bells in the steeples left standing.
Half-mast
The flags which meant order, for order is past.
Take the dust of the streets and sprinkle your head,
The civilization we've worked for is dead.
Squeeze into this archway, the head of the line
Has just swung round the corner to `Die Wacht am Rhein'.
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Written by
Oliver Wendell Holmes |
THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,--
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,--
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:--
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!
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Written by
Marilyn Hacker |
August First: it was a year ago
we drove down from St.
-Guilhem-le-Désert
to open the house in St.
Guiraud
rented unseen.
I'd stay; you'd go; that's where
our paths diverged.
I'd settle down to work,
you'd start the next month of your Wanderjahr.
I turned the iron key in the rusted lock
(it came, like a detective-story clue,
in a manila envelope, postmarked
elsewhere, unmarked otherwise) while you
stood behind me in the midday heat.
Somnolent shudders marked our progress.
Two
horses grazed on a roof across the street.
You didn't believe me until you turned around.
They were both old, one mottled gray, one white.
Past the kitchen's russet dark, we found
bookshelves on both sides of the fireplace:
Verlaine, L'Étranger, Notes from the Underground.
Through an archway, a fresh-plastered staircase
led steeply upward.
In a white room stood
a white-clad brass bed.
Sunlight in your face
came from the tree-filled window.
"You did good.
"
We laid crisp sheets we would inaugurate
that night, rescued from the grenier a wood-
en table we put under the window.
Date
our homes from that one, to which you returned
the last week of August, on a late
bus, in shorts, like a crew-cut, sunburned
bidasse.
Sunburned, in shorts, a new haircut,
with Auden and a racing pulse I'd earned
by "not being sentimental about
you," I sprinted to "La Populaire.
"
You walked into my arms when you got out.
At a two minute bus stop, who would care?
"La Populaire" puffed onward to Millau
while we hiked up to the hiatus where
we'd left ourselves when you left St.
Guiraud
after an unambiguous decade
of friendship, and some months of something new.
A long week before either of us said
a compromising word acknowledging
what happened every night in the brass bed
and every bird-heralded blue morning
was something we could claim and keep and use;
was, like the house, a place where we could bring
our road-worn, weary selves.
Now, we've a pause
in a year we wouldn't have wagered on.
Dusk climbs the tiled roof opposite; the blue's
still sun-soaked; it's a week now since you've gone
to be a daughter in the capital.
(I came north with you as far as Beaune.
)
I cook things you don't like.
Sometimes I fall
asleep, book open, one A.
M.
, sometimes
I long for you all night in Provencal
or langue d'oc, or wish I could, when I'm
too much awake.
My early walk, my late
walk mark the day's measures like rhyme.
(There's nothing I hate---perhaps I hate
the adipose deposits on my thighs
---as much as having to stay put and wait!)
Although a day alone cuts tight or lies
too limp sometimes, I know what I didn't know
a year ago, that makes it the right size:
owned certainty; perpetual surprise.
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Written by
Emile Verhaeren |
Yon, in the depths of the evening's track,
Like a herd of blind bullocks that seek their fellows,
Wild, as in terror, the tempest bellows.
And suddenly, there, o'er the gables black
That the church, in the twilight, around it raises
All scored with lightnings the steeple blazes.
See the old bell-ringer, frenzied with fear.
Mouth gaping, yet speechless, draw hastening near.
And the knell of alarm that with strokes of lead
He rings, heaves forth in a tempest of dread
The frantic despair that throbs in his head.
With the cross at the height
Of its summit brandished, the lofty steeple
Spreads the crimson mane
Of the fire o'er the plain
Toward the dream-like horizons that bound the night;
The city nocturnal is filled with light;
The face of the swift-gathered crowds doth people
With fears and with clamours both street and lane;
On walls turned suddenly dazzling bright
The dusky panes drink the crimson flood
Like draughts of blood.
Yet, knell upon knell, the old ringer doth cast
His frenzy and fear o'er the country vast.
The steeple, it seems to be growing higher
Against the horizon that shifts and quivers,
And to be flying in gleams of fire
Far o'er the lakes and the swampy rivers.
Its slates, like wings
Of sparks and spangles, afar it flings.
They fly toward the forests across the night:
And in their passage the fires exhume
The hovels and huts from their folds of gloom,
Setting them suddenly all alight.
In the crashing fall of the steeple's crown
The cross to the brazier's depth drops down,
Where, twisted and torn in the fiery fray,
Its Christian arms are crushed like prey.
With might and main
The bell-ringer sounds his knell abroad.
As though the flames would burn his God.
The fire
Funnel-like hollows its way yet higher,
'Twixt walls of stone, up the steeple's height;
Gaining the archway and lofty stage
Where, swinging in light, the bell bounds with rage.
The daws and the owls, with wild, long cry
Pass screeching by;
On the fast-closed casements their heads they smite,
Burn in the smoke-drifts their pinions light,
Then, broken with terror and bruised with flight.
Suddenly, 'mid the surging crowd.
Fall dead outright.
The old man sees toward his brandished bells
The climbing fire
With hands of boiling gold stretch nigher.
The steeple
Looks like a thicket of crimson bushes,
With here a branch of flame that rushes
Darting the belfry boards between;
Convulsed and savage flames, they cling,
With curves that plant-like curl and lean.
Round every joist, round every pulley,
And monumental beams, whence ring
The bells, that voice forth frenzied folly.
His fear and anguish spent, the ringer
Sounds his own knell
On his ruined bell.
A final crash,
All dust and plaster in one grey flash,
Cleaves the whole steeple's height in pieces;
And like some great cry slain, it ceases
All on a sudden, the knell's dull rage.
The ancient tower
Seems sudden to lean and darkly lower;
While with heavy thuds, as from stage to stage
They headlong bound.
The bells are heard
Plunging and crashing towards the ground.
But yet the old ringer has never stirred.
And, scooping the moist earth out, the bell
Was thus his coffin, and grave as well.
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