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Best Famous Firefly Poems

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Written by Robert Frost | Create an image from this poem

Pauls Wife

 To drive Paul out of any lumber camp
All that was needed was to say to him,
"How is the wife, Paul?"--and he'd disappear.
Some said it was because be bad no wife,
And hated to be twitted on the subject;
Others because he'd come within a day
Or so of having one, and then been Jilted;
Others because he'd had one once, a good one,
Who'd run away with someone else and left him;
And others still because he had one now
He only had to be reminded of--
He was all duty to her in a minute:
He had to run right off to look her up,
As if to say, "That's so, how is my wife?
I hope she isn't getting into mischief."
No one was anxious to get rid of Paul.
He'd been the hero of the mountain camps
Ever since, just to show them, he bad slipped
The bark of a whole tamarack off whole
As clean as boys do off a willow twig
To make a willow whistle on a Sunday
April by subsiding meadow brooks.
They seemed to ask him just to see him go,
"How is the wife, Paul?" and he always went.
He never stopped to murder anyone
Who asked the question. He just disappeared--
Nobody knew in what direction,
Although it wasn't usually long
Before they beard of him in some new camp,
The same Paul at the same old feats of logging.
The question everywhere was why should Paul
Object to being asked a civil question--
A man you could say almost anything to
Short of a fighting word. You have the answers.
And there was one more not so fair to Paul:
That Paul had married a wife not his equal.
Paul was ashamed of her. To match a hero
She would have had to be a heroine;
Instead of which she was some half-breed squaw.
But if the story Murphy told was true,
She wasn't anything to be ashamed of.

 You know Paul could do wonders. Everyone's
Heard how he thrashed the horses on a load
That wouldn't budge, until they simply stretched
Their rawhide harness from the load to camp.
Paul told the boss the load would be all right,
"The sun will bring your load in"--and it did--
By shrinking the rawhide to natural length.
That's what is called a stretcher. But I guess
The one about his jumping so's to land
With both his feet at once against the ceiling,
And then land safely right side up again,
Back on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact.
Well, this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife
Out of a white-pine log. Murphy was there
And, as you might say, saw the lady born.
Paul worked at anything in lumbering.
He'd been bard at it taking boards away
For--I forget--the last ambitious sawyer
To want to find out if he couldn't pile
The lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy.
They'd sliced the first slab off a big butt log,
And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back
To slam end-on again against the saw teeth.
To judge them by the way they caught themselves
When they saw what had happened to the log,
They must have had a guilty expectation
Something was going to go with their slambanging.
Something bad left a broad black streak of grease
On the new wood the whole length of the log
Except, perhaps, a foot at either end.
But when Paul put his finger in the grease,
It wasn't grease at all, but a long slot.
The log was hollow. They were sawing pine.
"First time I ever saw a hollow pine.
That comes of having Paul around the place.
Take it to bell for me," the sawyer said.
Everyone had to have a look at it
And tell Paul what he ought to do about it.
(They treated it as his.) "You take a jackknife,
And spread the opening, and you've got a dugout
All dug to go a-fishing in." To Paul
The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty
Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees.
There was no entrance for them to get in by.
It looked to him like some new kind of hollow
He thought he'd better take his jackknife to.
So after work that evening be came back
And let enough light into it by cutting
To see if it was empty. He made out in there
A slender length of pith, or was it pith?
It might have been the skin a snake had cast
And left stood up on end inside the tree
The hundred years the tree must have been growing.
More cutting and he bad this in both hands,
And looking from it to the pond nearby,
Paul wondered how it would respond to water.
Not a breeze stirred, but just the breath of air
He made in walking slowly to the beach
Blew it once off his hands and almost broke it.
He laid it at the edge, where it could drink.
At the first drink it rustled and grew limp.
At the next drink it grew invisible.
Paul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers,
And thought it must have melted. It was gone.
And then beyond the open water, dim with midges,
Where the log drive lay pressed against the boom,
It slowly rose a person, rose a girl,
Her wet hair heavy on her like a helmet,
Who, leaning on a log, looked back at Paul.
And that made Paul in turn look back
To see if it was anyone behind him
That she was looking at instead of him.
(Murphy had been there watching all the time,
But from a shed where neither of them could see him.)
There was a moment of suspense in birth
When the girl seemed too waterlogged to live,
Before she caught her first breath with a gasp
And laughed. Then she climbed slowly to her feet,
And walked off, talking to herself or Paul,
Across the logs like backs of alligators,
Paul taking after her around the pond.

 Next evening Murphy and some other fellows
Got drunk, and tracked the pair up Catamount,
From the bare top of which there is a view
TO other hills across a kettle valley.
And there, well after dark, let Murphy tell it,
They saw Paul and his creature keeping house.
It was the only glimpse that anyone
Has had of Paul and her since Murphy saw them
Falling in love across the twilight millpond.
More than a mile across the wilderness
They sat together halfway up a cliff
In a small niche let into it, the girl
Brightly, as if a star played on the place,
Paul darkly, like her shadow. All the light
Was from the girl herself, though, not from a star,
As was apparent from what happened next.
All those great ruffians put their throats together,
And let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle,
As a brute tribute of respect to beauty.
Of course the bottle fell short by a mile,
But the shout reached the girl and put her light out.
She went out like a firefly, and that was all.

 So there were witnesses that Paul was married
And not to anyone to be ashamed of
Everyone had been wrong in judging Paul.
Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs
About his wife to keep her to himself.
Paul was what's called a terrible possessor.
Owning a wife with him meant owning her.
She wasn't anybody else's business,
Either to praise her or much as name her,
And he'd thank people not to think of her.
Murphy's idea was that a man like Paul
Wouldn't be spoken to about a wife
In any way the world knew how to speak.


Written by Katherine Mansfield | Create an image from this poem

Camomile Tea

Outside the sky is light with stars; 
There's a hollow roaring from the sea. 
And, alas! for the little almond flowers, 
The wind is shaking the almond tree. 

How little I thought, a year ago, 
In the horrible cottage upon the Lee 
That he and I should be sitting so 
And sipping a cup of camomile tea. 

Light as feathers the witches fly, 
The horn of the moon is plain to see; 
By a firefly under a jonquil flower 
A goblin toasts a bumble-bee. 

We might be fifty, we might be five, 
So snug, so compact, so wise are we! 
Under the kitchen-table leg 
My knee is pressing against his knee. 

Our shutters are shut, the fire is low, 
The tap is dripping peacefully; 
The saucepan shadows on the wall 
Are black and round and plain to see. 
Written by Gregory Corso | Create an image from this poem

Gregory Corso

 Budger of history Brake of time You Bomb
 Toy of universe Grandest of all snatched sky I cannot hate you
 Do I hate the mischievous thunderbolt the jawbone of an ass
 The bumpy club of One Million B.C. the mace the flail the axe
 Catapult Da Vinci tomahawk Cochise flintlock Kidd dagger Rathbone
 Ah and the sad desparate gun of Verlaine Pushkin Dillinger Bogart
 And hath not St. Michael a burning sword St. George a lance David a sling
 Bomb you are as cruel as man makes you and you're no crueller than cancer
 All Man hates you they'd rather die by car-crash lightning drowning
Falling off a roof electric-chair heart-attack old age old age O Bomb
 They'd rather die by anything but you Death's finger is free-lance
 Not up to man whether you boom or not Death has long since distributed its
 categorical blue I sing thee Bomb Death's extravagance Death's jubilee
 Gem of Death's supremest blue The flyer will crash his death will differ
 with the climbor who'll fall to die by cobra is not to die by bad pork
Some die by swamp some by sea and some by the bushy-haired man in the night
 O there are deaths like witches of Arc Scarey deaths like Boris Karloff
 No-feeling deaths like birth-death sadless deaths like old pain Bowery
 Abandoned deaths like Capital Punishment stately deaths like senators
 And unthinkable deaths like Harpo Marx girls on Vogue covers my own
 I do not know just how horrible Bombdeath is I can only imagine
 Yet no other death I know has so laughable a preview I scope
 a city New York City streaming starkeyed subway shelter 
 Scores and scores A fumble of humanity High heels bend
 Hats whelming away Youth forgetting their combs
 Ladies not knowing what to do with their shopping bags
 Unperturbed gum machines Yet dangerous 3rd rail
 Ritz Brothers from the Bronx caught in the A train
 The smiling Schenley poster will always smile
 Impish death Satyr Bomb Bombdeath
 Turtles exploding over Istanbul
 The jaguar's flying foot
 soon to sink in arctic snow
 Penguins plunged against the Sphinx
 The top of the Empire state
 arrowed in a broccoli field in Sicily
 Eiffel shaped like a C in Magnolia Gardens
 St. Sophia peeling over Sudan
 O athletic Death Sportive Bomb
 the temples of ancient times
 their grand ruin ceased
 Electrons Protons Neutrons 
 gathering Hersperean hair
 walking the dolorous gulf of Arcady
 joining marble helmsmen
 entering the final ampitheater
 with a hymnody feeling of all Troys
 heralding cypressean torches
 racing plumes and banners
 and yet knowing Homer with a step of grace
 Lo the visiting team of Present
 the home team of Past
 Lyre and tube together joined
 Hark the hotdog soda olive grape
 gala galaxy robed and uniformed 
 commissary O the happy stands
 Ethereal root and cheer and boo
 The billioned all-time attendance
 The Zeusian pandemonium
 Hermes racing Owens
 The Spitball of Buddha
 Christ striking out
 Luther stealing third
 Planeterium Death Hosannah Bomb
 Gush the final rose O Spring Bomb
 Come with thy gown of dynamite green
 unmenace Nature's inviolate eye
 Before you the wimpled Past
 behind you the hallooing Future O Bomb
 Bound in the grassy clarion air
 like the fox of the tally-ho
 thy field the universe thy hedge the geo
 Leap Bomb bound Bomb frolic zig and zag
 The stars a swarm of bees in thy binging bag
 Stick angels on your jubilee feet
 wheels of rainlight on your bunky seat
 You are due and behold you are due
 and the heavens are with you
 hosanna incalescent glorious liaison
 BOMB O havoc antiphony molten cleft BOOM
 Bomb mark infinity a sudden furnace
 spread thy multitudinous encompassed Sweep
 set forth awful agenda
 Carrion stars charnel planets carcass elements
 Corpse the universe tee-hee finger-in-the-mouth hop
 over its long long dead Nor
 From thy nimbled matted spastic eye
 exhaust deluges of celestial ghouls
 From thy appellational womb
 spew birth-gusts of of great worms
 Rip open your belly Bomb
 from your belly outflock vulturic salutations
 Battle forth your spangled hyena finger stumps
 along the brink of Paradise
 O Bomb O final Pied Piper
 both sun and firefly behind your shock waltz
 God abandoned mock-nude
 beneath His thin false-talc's apocalypse
 He cannot hear thy flute's
 happy-the-day profanations
 He is spilled deaf into the Silencer's warty ear
 His Kingdom an eternity of crude wax
 Clogged clarions untrumpet Him
 Sealed angels unsing Him
 A thunderless God A dead God
 O Bomb thy BOOM His tomb
 That I lean forward on a desk of science
 an astrologer dabbling in dragon prose
 half-smart about wars bombs especially bombs
 That I am unable to hate what is necessary to love 
 That I can't exist in a world that consents
 a child in a park a man dying in an electric-chair
 That I am able to laugh at all things
 all that I know and do not know thus to conceal my pain
 That I say I am a poet and therefore love all man
 knowing my words to be the acquainted prophecy of all men
 and my unwords no less an acquaintanceship
 That I am manifold
 a man pursuing the big lies of gold
 or a poet roaming in bright ashes
 or that which I imagine myself to be 
 a shark-toothed sleep a man-eater of dreams
 I need not then be all-smart about bombs
 Happily so for if I felt bombs were caterpillars
 I'd doubt not they'd become butterflies
 There is a hell for bombs
 They're there I see them there
 They sit in bits and sing songs
  mostly German songs
 And two very long American songs
 and they wish there were more songs
 especially Russian and Chinese songs
 and some more very long American songs
 Poor little Bomb that'll never be 
 an Eskimo song I love thee 
 I want to put a lollipop
 in thy furcal mouth
 A wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean
 and have you skip with me Hansel and Gretel
 along the Hollywoodian screen
 O Bomb in which all lovely things
 moral and physical anxiously participate
  O fairylike plucked from the 
 grandest universe tree 
 O piece of heaven which gives
 both mountain and anthill a sun
 I am standing before your fantastic lily door
 I bring you Midgardian roses Arcadian musk
 Reputed cosmetics from the girls of heaven
 Welcome me fear not thy opened door
 nor thy cold ghost's grey memory
 nor the pimps of indefinite weather
 their cruel terrestial thaw
 Oppenheimer is seated
 in the dark pocket of Light
 Fermi is dry in Death's Mozambique
 Einstein his mythmouth
 a barnacled wreath on the moon-squid's head
 Let me in Bomb rise from that pregnant-rat corner
 nor fear the raised-broom nations of the world
 O Bomb I love you
 I want to kiss your clank eat your boom
 You are a paean an acme of scream
 a lyric hat of Mister Thunder
 O resound thy tanky knees
 BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM
 BOOM ye skies and BOOM ye suns
 BOOM BOOM ye moons ye stars BOOM
 nights ye BOOM ye days ye BOOM
 BOOM BOOM ye winds ye clouds ye rains
 go BANG ye lakes ye oceans BING
 Barracuda BOOM and cougar BOOM
 Ubangi BOOM orangutang 
 BING BANG BONG BOOM bee bear baboon
 ye BANG ye BONG ye BING
 the tail the fin the wing
 Yes Yes into our midst a bomb will fall
 Flowers will leap in joy their roots aching
 Fields will kneel proud beneath the halleluyahs of the wind
 Pinkbombs will blossom Elkbombs will perk their ears
 Ah many a bomb that day will awe the bird a gentle look
 Yet not enough to say a bomb will fall
 or even contend celestial fire goes out
 Know that the earth will madonna the Bomb
 that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born
 magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine all beautiful
 and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires
 fierce with moustaches of gold
Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson | Create an image from this poem

Summer Night

NOW sleeps the crimson petal, now the white; 
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk; 
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font: 
The firefly wakens: waken thou with me. 

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost, 5 
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

Now lies the Earth all Dana? to the stars, 
And all thy heart lies open unto me. 

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves 
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me. 10 

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up, 
And slips into the bosom of the lake: 
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip 
Into my bosom and be lost in me. 

Written by Conrad Aiken | Create an image from this poem

Improvisations: Light And Snow

 I

The girl in the room beneath 
Before going to bed 
Strums on a mandolin 
The three simple tunes she knows. 
How inadequate they are to tell how her heart feels! 
When she has finished them several times 
She thrums the strings aimlessly with her finger-nails 
And smiles, and thinks happily of many things.

II

I stood for a long while before the shop window 
Looking at the blue butterflies embroidered on tawny silk. 
The building was a tower before me, 
Time was loud behind me, 
Sun went over the housetops and dusty trees; 
And there they were, glistening, brilliant, motionless, 
Stitched in a golden sky 
By yellow patient fingers long since turned to dust.

III

The first bell is silver, 
And breathing darkness I think only of the long scythe of time. 
The second bell is crimson, 
And I think of a holiday night, with rockets 
Furrowing the sky with red, and a soft shatter of stars. 
The third bell is saffron and slow, 
And I behold a long sunset over the sea 
With wall on wall of castled cloud and glittering balustrades. 
The fourth bell is color of bronze, 
I walk by a frozen lake in the dun light of dusk: 
Muffled crackings run in the ice, 
Trees creak, birds fly. 
The fifth bell is cold clear azure, 
Delicately tinged with green: 
One golden star hangs melting in it, 
And towards this, sleepily, I go. 
The sixth bell is as if a pebble 
Had been dropped into a deep sea far above me . . . 
Rings of sound ebb slowly into the silence.

IV

On the day when my uncle and I drove to the cemetery, 
Rain rattled on the roof of the carriage; 
And talkng constrainedly of this and that 
We refrained from looking at the child's coffin on the seat before us. 
When we reached the cemetery 
We found that the thin snow on the grass 
Was already transparent with rain; 
And boards had been laid upon it 
That we might walk without wetting our feet.

V

When I was a boy, and saw bright rows of icicles 
In many lengths along a wall 
I was dissappointed to find 
That I could not play music upon them: 
I ran my hand lightly across them 
And they fell, tinkling. 
I tell you this, young man, so that your expectations of life 
Will not be too great.

VI

It is now two hours since I left you, 
And the perfume of your hands is still on my hands. 
And though since then 
I have looked at the stars, walked in the cold blue streets, 
And heard the dead leaves blowing over the ground 
Under the trees, 
I still remember the sound of your laughter. 
How will it be, lady, when there is none left to remember you 
Even as long as this? 
Will the dust braid your hair?

VII

The day opens with the brown light of snowfall 
And past the window snowflakes fall and fall. 
I sit in my chair all day and work and work 
Measuring words against each other. 
I open the piano and play a tune 
But find it does not say what I feel, 
I grow tired of measuring words against each other, 
I grow tired of these four walls, 
And I think of you, who write me that you have just had a daughter 
And named her after your first sweetheart, 
And you, who break your heart, far away, 
In the confusion and savagery of a long war, 
And you who, worn by the bitterness of winter, 
Will soon go south. 
The snowflakes fall almost straight in the brown light 
Past my window, 
And a sparrow finds refuge on my window-ledge. 
This alone comes to me out of the world outside 
As I measure word with word.

VIII

Many things perplex me and leave me troubled, 
Many things are locked away in the white book of stars 
Never to be opened by me. 
The starr'd leaves are silently turned, 
And the mooned leaves; 
And as they are turned, fall the shadows of life and death. 
Perplexed and troubled, 
I light a small light in a small room, 
The lighted walls come closer to me, 
The familiar pictures are clear. 
I sit in my favourite chair and turn in my mind 
The tiny pages of my own life, whereon so little is written, 
And hear at the eastern window the pressure of a long wind, coming 
From I know not where.

How many times have I sat here, 
How many times will I sit here again, 
Thinking these same things over and over in solitude 
As a child says over and over 
The first word he has learned to say.

IX

This girl gave her heart to me, 
And this, and this. 
This one looked at me as if she loved me, 
And silently walked away. 
This one I saw once and loved, and never saw her again.

Shall I count them for you upon my fingers? 
Or like a priest solemnly sliding beads? 
Or pretend they are roses, pale pink, yellow, and white, 
And arrange them for you in a wide bowl 
To be set in sunlight? 
See how nicely it sounds as I count them for you—
'This girl gave her heart to me 
And this, and this, . . . ! 
And nevertheless, my heart breaks when I think of them, 
When I think their names, 
And how, like leaves, they have changed and blown 
And will lie, at last, forgotten, 
Under the snow. 

X

It is night time, and cold, and snow is falling, 
And no wind grieves the walls. 
In the small world of light around the arc-lamp 
A swarm of snowflakes falls and falls. 
The street grows silent. The last stranger passes. 
The sound of his feet, in the snow, is indistinct.

What forgotten sadness is it, on a night like this, 
Takes possession of my heart? 
Why do I think of a camellia tree in a southern garden, 
With pink blossoms among dark leaves, 
Standing, surprised, in the snow? 
Why do I think of spring?

The snowflakes, helplessly veering,, 
Fall silently past my window; 
They come from darkness and enter darkness. 
What is it in my heart is surprised and bewildered 
Like that camellia tree, 
Beautiful still in its glittering anguish? 
And spring so far away!

XI

As I walked through the lamplit gardens, 
On the thin white crust of snow, 
So intensely was I thinking of my misfortune, 
So clearly were my eyes fixed 
On the face of this grief which has come to me, 
That I did not notice the beautiful pale colouring 
Of lamplight on the snow; 
Nor the interlaced long blue shadows of trees;

And yet these things were there, 
And the white lamps, and the orange lamps, and the lamps of lilac were there, 
As I have seen them so often before; 
As they will be so often again 
Long after my grief is forgotten.

And still, though I know this, and say this, it cannot console me.

XII

How many times have we been interrupted 
Just as I was about to make up a story for you! 
One time it was because we suddenly saw a firefly 
Lighting his green lantern among the boughs of a fir-tree. 
Marvellous! Marvellous! He is making for himself 
A little tent of light in the darkness! 
And one time it was because we saw a lilac lightning flash 
Run wrinkling into the blue top of the mountain,—
We heard boulders of thunder rolling down upon us 
And the plat-plat of drops on the window, 
And we ran to watch the rain 
Charging in wavering clouds across the long grass of the field! 
Or at other times it was because we saw a star 
Slipping easily out of the sky and falling, far off, 
Among pine-dark hills; 
Or because we found a crimson eft 
Darting in the cold grass!

These things interrupted us and left us wondering; 
And the stories, whatever they might have been, 
Were never told. 
A fairy, binding a daisy down and laughing? 
A golden-haired princess caught in a cobweb? 
A love-story of long ago? 
Some day, just as we are beginning again, 
Just as we blow the first sweet note, 
Death itself will interrupt us.

XIII

My heart is an old house, and in that forlorn old house, 
In the very centre, dark and forgotten, 
Is a locked room where an enchanted princess 
Lies sleeping. 
But sometimes, in that dark house, 
As if almost from the stars, far away, 
Sounds whisper in that secret room—
Faint voices, music, a dying trill of laughter? 
And suddenly, from her long sleep, 
The beautiful princess awakes and dances.

Who is she? I do not know. 
Why does she dance? Do not ask me!—
Yet to-day, when I saw you, 
When I saw your eyes troubled with the trouble of happiness, 
And your mouth trembling into a smile, 
And your fingers pull shyly forward,—
Softly, in that room, 
The little princess arose 
And danced; 
And as she danced the old house gravely trembled 
With its vague and delicious secret.

XIV

Like an old tree uprooted by the wind 
And flung down cruelly 
With roots bared to the sun and stars 
And limp leaves brought to earth—
Torn from its house—
So do I seem to myself 
When you have left me.

XV

The music of the morning is red and warm; 
Snow lies against the walls; 
And on the sloping roof in the yellow sunlight 
Pigeons huddle against the wind. 
The music of evening is attenuated and thin—
The moon seen through a wave by a mermaid; 
The crying of a violin. 
Far down there, far down where the river turns to the west, 
The delicate lights begin to twinkle 
On the dusky arches of the bridge: 
In the green sky a long cloud, 
A smouldering wave of smoky crimson, 
Breaks in the freezing wind: and above it, unabashed, 
Remote, untouched, fierly palpitant, 
Sings the first star.


Written by Ogden Nash | Create an image from this poem

The Firefly

 The firefly's flame 
Is something for which science has no name 
I can think of nothing eerier 
Than flying around with an unidentified glow on a 
person's posteerier.
Written by Kahlil Gibran | Create an image from this poem

Pleasure XXIV

 Then a hermit, who visited the city once a year, came forth and said, "Speak to us of Pleasure." 

And he answered, saying: 

Pleasure is a freedom song, 

But it is not freedom. 

It is the blossoming of your desires, 

But it is not their fruit. 

It is a depth calling unto a height, 

But it is not the deep nor the high. 

It is the caged taking wing, 

But it is not space encompassed. 

Ay, in very truth, pleasure is a freedom-song. 

And I fain would have you sing it with fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing. 

Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are judged and rebuked. 

I would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have them seek. 

For they shall find pleasure, but not her alone: 

Seven are her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure. 

Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure? 

And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness. 

But regret is the beclouding of the mind and not its chastisement. 

They should remember their pleasures with gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer. 

Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them be comforted. 

And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember; 

And in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it. 

But even in their foregoing is their pleasure. 

And thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands. 

But tell me, who is he that can offend the spirit? 

Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars? 

And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind? 

Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with a staff? 

Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being. 

Who knows but that which seems omitted today, waits for tomorrow? 

Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived. 

And your body is the harp of your soul, 

And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds. 

And now you ask in your heart, "How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?" 

Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, 

But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. 

For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, 

And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, 

And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy. 

People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.
Written by Robert Francis | Create an image from this poem

Silent Poem

 backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk
underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow 

woodsmoke cowbarn honeysuckle woodpile
sawhorse bucksaw outhouse wellsweep 

backdoor flagstone bulkhead buttermilk
candlestick ragrug firedog brownbread 

hilltop outcrop cowbell buttercup
whetstone thunderstorm pitchfork steeplebush 

gristmill millstone cornmeal waterwheel
watercress buckwheat firefly jewelweed 

gravestone groundpine windbreak bedrock
weathercock snowfall starlight cockcrow
Written by Alfred Lord Tennyson | Create an image from this poem

Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

 Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font;
The firefly wakens, waken thou with me. 

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars, 
And all thy heart lies open unto me. 

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts, in me. 

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake.
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Memoranda

 THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.

Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.

These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts; these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I turn my head and say good-by to no one who hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry