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Best Famous Glint Poems

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Written by Anne Sexton | Create an image from this poem

The Break Away

 Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as we did yearly
under the crayoned-in sun.
The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break into two cans ready for recycling, flattened tin humans and a tin law, even for my twenty-five years of hanging on by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.
The gray room: Judge, lawyer, witness and me and invisible Skeezix, and all the other torn enduring the bewilderments of their division.
Your daisies have come on the day of my divorce.
They arrive like round yellow fish, sucking with love at the coral of our love.
Yet they wait, in their short time, like little utero half-borns, half killed, thin and bone soft.
They breathe the air that stands for twenty-five illicit days, the sun crawling inside the sheets, the moon spinning like a tornado in the washbowl, and we orchestrated them both, calling ourselves TWO CAMP DIRECTORS.
There was a song, our song on your cassette, that played over and over and baptised the prodigals.
It spoke the unspeakable, as the rain will on an attic roof, letting the animal join its soul as we kneeled before a miracle-- forgetting its knife.
The daisies confer in the old-married kitchen papered with blue and green chefs who call out pies, cookies, yummy, at the charcoal and cigarette smoke they wear like a yellowy salve.
The daisies absorb it all-- the twenty-five-year-old sanctioned love (If one could call such handfuls of fists and immobile arms that!) and on this day my world rips itself up while the country unfastens along with its perjuring king and his court.
It unfastens into an abortion of belief, as in me-- the legal rift-- as on might do with the daisies but does not for they stand for a love undergoihng open heart surgery that might take if one prayed tough enough.
And yet I demand, even in prayer, that I am not a thief, a mugger of need, and that your heart survive on its own, belonging only to itself, whole, entirely whole, and workable in its dark cavern under your ribs.
I pray it will know truth, if truth catches in its cup and yet I pray, as a child would, that the surgery take.
I dream it is taking.
Next I dream the love is swallowing itself.
Next I dream the love is made of glass, glass coming through the telephone that is breaking slowly, day by day, into my ear.
Next I dream that I put on the love like a lifejacket and we float, jacket and I, we bounce on that priest-blue.
We are as light as a cat's ear and it is safe, safe far too long! And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window and peer down at the moon in the pond and know that beauty has walked over my head, into this bedroom and out, flowing out through the window screen, dropping deep into the water to hide.
I will observe the daisies fade and dry up wuntil they become flour, snowing themselves onto the table beside the drone of the refrigerator, beside the radio playing Frankie (as often as FM will allow) snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling-- as twenty-five years split from my side like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.
It is six P.
M.
as I water these tiny weeds and their little half-life, their numbered days that raged like a secret radio, recalling love that I picked up innocently, yet guiltily, as my five-year-old daughter picked gum off the sidewalk and it became suddenly an elastic miracle.
For me it was love found like a diamond where carrots grow-- the glint of diamond on a plane wing, meaning: DANGER! THICK ICE! but the good crunch of that orange, the diamond, the carrot, both with four million years of resurrecting dirt, and the love, although Adam did not know the word, the love of Adam obeying his sudden gift.
You, who sought me for nine years, in stories made up in front of your naked mirror or walking through rooms of fog women, you trying to forget the mother who built guilt with the lumber of a locked door as she sobbed her soured mild and fed you loss through the keyhole, you who wrote out your own birth and built it with your own poems, your own lumber, your own keyhole, into the trunk and leaves of your manhood, you, who fell into my words, years before you fell into me (the other, both the Camp Director and the camper), you who baited your hook with wide-awake dreams, and calls and letters and once a luncheon, and twice a reading by me for you.
But I wouldn't! Yet this year, yanking off all past years, I took the bait and was pulled upward, upward, into the sky and was held by the sun-- the quick wonder of its yellow lap-- and became a woman who learned her own shin and dug into her soul and found it full, and you became a man who learned his won skin and dug into his manhood, his humanhood and found you were as real as a baker or a seer and we became a home, up into the elbows of each other's soul, without knowing-- an invisible purchase-- that inhabits our house forever.
We were blessed by the House-Die by the altar of the color T.
V.
and somehow managed to make a tiny marriage, a tiny marriage called belief, as in the child's belief in the tooth fairy, so close to absolute, so daft within a year or two.
The daisies have come for the last time.
And I who have, each year of my life, spoken to the tooth fairy, believing in her, even when I was her, am helpless to stop your daisies from dying, although your voice cries into the telephone: Marry me! Marry me! and my voice speaks onto these keys tonight: The love is in dark trouble! The love is starting to die, right now-- we are in the process of it.
The empty process of it.
I see two deaths, and the two men plod toward the mortuary of my heart, and though I willed one away in court today and I whisper dreams and birthdays into the other, they both die like waves breaking over me and I am drowning a little, but always swimming among the pillows and stones of the breakwater.
And though your daisies are an unwanted death, I wade through the smell of their cancer and recognize the prognosis, its cartful of loss-- I say now, you gave what you could.
It was quite a ferris wheel to spin on! and the dead city of my marriage seems less important than the fact that the daisies came weekly, over and over, likes kisses that can't stop themselves.
There sit two deaths on November 5th, 1973.
Let one be forgotten-- Bury it! Wall it up! But let me not forget the man of my child-like flowers though he sinks into the fog of Lake Superior, he remains, his fingers the marvel of fourth of July sparklers, his furious ice cream cones of licking, remains to cool my forehead with a washcloth when I sweat into the bathtub of his being.
For the rest that is left: name it gentle, as gentle as radishes inhabiting their short life in the earth, name it gentle, gentle as old friends waving so long at the window, or in the drive, name it gentle as maple wings singing themselves upon the pond outside, as sensuous as the mother-yellow in the pond, that night that it was ours, when our bodies floated and bumped in moon water and the cicadas called out like tongues.
Let such as this be resurrected in all men whenever they mold their days and nights as when for twenty-five days and nights you molded mine and planted the seed that dives into my God and will do so forever no matter how often I sweep the floor.


Written by Stephen Vincent Benet | Create an image from this poem

The White Peacock

 (France -- Ancient Regime.
) I.
Go away! Go away; I will not confess to you! His black biretta clings like a hangman's cap; under his twitching fingers the beads shiver and click, As he mumbles in his corner, the shadow deepens upon him; I will not confess! .
.
.
Is he there or is it intenser shadow? Dark huddled coilings from the obscene depths, Black, formless shadow, Shadow.
Doors creak; from secret parts of the chateau come the scuffle and worry of rats.
Orange light drips from the guttering candles, Eddying over the vast embroideries of the bed Stirring the monstrous tapestries, Retreating before the sable impending gloom of the canopy With a swift thrust and sparkle of gold, Lipping my hands, Then Rippling back abashed before the ominous silences Like the swift turns and starts of an overpowered fencer Who sees before him Horror Behind him darkness, Shadow.
The clock jars and strikes, a thin, sudden note like the sob of a child.
Clock, buhl clock that ticked out the tortuous hours of my birth, Clock, evil, wizened dwarf of a clock, how many years of agony have you relentlessly measured, Yardstick of my stifling shroud? I am Aumaury de Montreuil; once quick, soon to be eaten of worms.
You hear, Father? Hsh, he is asleep in the night's cloak.
Over me too steals sleep.
Sleep like a white mist on the rotting paintings of cupids and gods on the ceiling; Sleep on the carven shields and knots at the foot of the bed, Oozing, blurring outlines, obliterating colors, Death.
Father, Father, I must not sleep! It does not hear -- that shadow crouched in the corner .
.
.
Is it a shadow? One might think so indeed, save for the calm face, yellow as wax, that lifts like the face of a drowned man from the choking darkness.
II.
Out of the drowsy fog my body creeps back to me.
It is the white time before dawn.
Moonlight, watery, pellucid, lifeless, ripples over the world.
The grass beneath it is gray; the stars pale in the sky.
The night dew has fallen; An infinity of little drops, crystals from which all light has been taken, Glint on the sighing branches.
All is purity, without color, without stir, without passion.
Suddenly a peacock screams.
My heart shocks and stops; Sweat, cold corpse-sweat Covers my rigid body.
My hair stands on end.
I cannot stir.
I cannot speak.
It is terror, terror that is walking the pale sick gardens And the eyeless face no man may see and live! Ah-h-h-h-h! Father, Father, wake! wake and save me! In his corner all is shadow.
Dead things creep from the ground.
It is so long ago that she died, so long ago! Dust crushes her, earth holds her, mold grips her.
Fiends, do you not know that she is dead? .
.
.
"Let us dance the pavon!" she said; the waxlights glittered like swords on the polished floor.
Twinkling on jewelled snuffboxes, beaming savagely from the crass gold of candelabra, From the white shoulders of girls and the white powdered wigs of men .
.
.
All life was that dance.
The mocking, resistless current, The beauty, the passion, the perilous madness -- As she took my hand, released it and spread her dresses like petals, Turning, swaying in beauty, A lily, bowed by the rain, -- Moonlight she was, and her body of moonlight and foam, And her eyes stars.
Oh the dance has a pattern! But the clear grace of her thrilled through the notes of the viols, Tremulous, pleading, escaping, immortal, untamed, And, as we ended, She blew me a kiss from her hand like a drifting white blossom -- And the starshine was gone; and she fled like a bird up the stair.
Underneath the window a peacock screams, And claws click, scrape Like little lacquered boots on the rough stone.
Oh the long fantasy of the kiss; the ceaseless hunger, ceaselessly, divinely appeased! The aching presence of the beloved's beauty! The wisdom, the incense, the brightness! Once more on the ice-bright floor they danced the pavon But I turned to the garden and her from the lighted candles.
Softly I trod the lush grass between the black hedges of box.
Softly, for I should take her unawares and catch her arms, And embrace her, dear and startled.
By the arbor all the moonlight flowed in silver And her head was on his breast.
She did not scream or shudder When my sword was where her head had lain In the quiet moonlight; But turned to me with one pale hand uplifted, All her satins fiery with the starshine, Nacreous, shimmering, weeping, iridescent, Like the quivering plumage of a peacock .
.
.
Then her head drooped and I gripped her hair, Oh soft, scented cloud across my fingers! -- Bending her white neck back.
.
.
.
Blood writhed on my hands; I trod in blood.
.
.
.
Stupidly agaze At that crumpled heap of silk and moonlight, Where like twitching pinions, an arm twisted, Palely, and was still As the face of chalk.
The buhl clock strikes.
Thirty years.
Christ, thirty years! Agony.
Agony.
Something stirs in the window, Shattering the moonlight.
White wings fan.
Father, Father! All its plumage fiery with the starshine, Nacreous, shimmering, weeping, iridescent, It drifts across the floor and mounts the bed, To the tap of little satin shoes.
Gazing with infernal eyes.
Its quick beak thrusting, rending, devil's crimson .
.
.
Screams, great tortured screams shake the dark canopy.
The light flickers, the shadow in the corner stirs; The wax face lifts; the eyes open.
A thin trickle of blood worms darkly against the vast red coverlet and spreads to a pool on the floor.
Written by Carolyn Kizer | Create an image from this poem

The Intruder

 My mother-- preferring the strange to the tame:
Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,
Frog's belly distended with finny young,
Leaf-mould wilderness, hare-bell, toadstool,
Odd, small snakes loving through the leaves,
Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all
Wild and natural -flashed out her instinctive love,
and quick, she
Picked up the fluttering.
bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet, And held the little horror to the mirror, where He gazed on himself and shrieked like an old screen door far off.
Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing Came clattering down like a small black shutter.
Still tranquil, she began, "It's rather sweet.
.
.
" The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint In the caught eyes.
Then we saw And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow, Nested within the wing-pits, cozily sucked and snoozed, The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud, Swiftly, the cat with a clean careful mouth Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.
But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor Remained, of all my my mother's tender, wounding passion For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones, Whose denizens can turn upon the world With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw To sting or soil benevolence, alien As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot, She swept to the kitchen.
Turning on the tap, She washed and washed the pity from her hands.
Written by G K Chesterton | Create an image from this poem

Lepanto

 White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, 
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; 
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared, 
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard; 
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; 
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far, Don John of Austria is going to the war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled, Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world, Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain--hurrah! Death-light of Africa! Don John of Austria Is riding to the sea.
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star, (Don John of Austria is going to the war.
) He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees, His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease, And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees; And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii, Multiplex of wing and eye, Whose strong obedience broke the sky When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn, From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn; They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be, On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl, Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl; They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,-- They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide, And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide, And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest, For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun, Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know The voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago: It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate; It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate! It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth, Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.
" For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar, (Don John of Austria is going to the war.
) Sudden and still--hurrah! Bolt from Iberia! Don John of Austria Is gone by Alcalar.
St.
Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north (Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.
) Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone; The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone; The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes, And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,-- But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips, Trumpet that sayeth ha! Domino gloria! Don John of Austria Is shouting to the ships.
King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck (Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.
) The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin, And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon, He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon, And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day, And death is in the phial and the end of noble work, But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed-- Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha! Gun upon gun, hurrah! Don John of Austria Has loosed the cannonade.
The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke, (Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.
) The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year, The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery; They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark, They veil the plum?d lions on the galleys of St.
Mark; And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs, And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs, Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell, And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign-- (But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!) Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop, Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop, Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds, Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania! Domino Gloria! Don John of Austria Has set his people free! Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath (Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.
) And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain, Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain, And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade.
.
.
.
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.
)
Written by Audre Lorde | Create an image from this poem

Inheritance—His

 I.
My face resembles your face less and less each day.
When I was young no one mistook whose child I was.
Features build coloring alone among my creamy fine-boned sisters marked me Byron's daughter.
No sun set when you died, but a door opened onto my mother.
After you left she grieved her crumpled world aloft an iron fist sweated with business symbols a printed blotter dwell in the house of Lord's your hollow voice changing down a hospital corridor yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.
II.
I rummage through the deaths you lived swaying on a bridge of question.
At seven in Barbados dropped into your unknown father's life your courage vault from his tailor's table back to the sea.
Did the Grenada treeferns sing your 15th summer as you jumped ship to seek your mother finding her too late surrounded with new sons? Who did you bury to become the enforcer of the law the handsome legend before whose raised arm even trees wept a man of deep and wordless passion who wanted sons and got five girls? You left the first two scratching in a treefern's shade the youngest is a renegade poet searching for your answer in my blood.
My mother's Grenville tales spin through early summer evenings.
But you refused to speak of home of stepping proud Black and penniless into this land where only white men ruled by money.
How you labored in the docks of the Hotel Astor your bright wife a chambermaid upstairs welded love and survival to ambition as the land of promise withered crashed the hotel closed and you peddle dawn-bought apples from a push-cart on Broadway.
Does an image of return wealthy and triumphant warm your chilblained fingers as you count coins in the Manhattan snow or is it only Linda who dreams of home? When my mother's first-born cries for milk in the brutal city winter do the faces of your other daughters dim like the image of the treeferned yard where a dark girl first cooked for you and her ash heap still smells of curry? III.
Did the secret of my sisters steal your tongue like I stole money from your midnight pockets stubborn and quaking as you threaten to shoot me if I am the one? The naked lightbulbs in our kitchen ceiling glint off your service revolver as you load whispering.
Did two little dark girls in Grenada dart like flying fish between your averted eyes and my pajamaless body our last adolescent summer? Eavesdropped orations to your shaving mirror our most intense conversations were you practicing how to tell me of my twin sisters abandoned as you had been abandoned by another Black woman seeking her fortune Grenada Barbados Panama Grenada.
New York City.
IV.
You bought old books at auctions for my unlanguaged world gave me your idols Marcus Garvey Citizen Kane and morsels from your dinner plate when I was seven.
I owe you my Dahomeyan jaw the free high school for gifted girls no one else thought I should attend and the darkness that we share.
Our deepest bonds remain the mirror and the gun.
V.
An elderly Black judge known for his way with women visits this island where I live shakes my hand, smiling.
"I knew your father," he says "quite a man!" Smiles again.
I flinch at his raised eyebrow.
A long-gone woman's voice lashes out at me in parting "You will never be satisfied until you have the whole world in your bed!" Now I am older than you were when you died overwork and silence exploding your brain.
You are gradually receding from my face.
Who were you outside the 23rd Psalm? Knowing so little how did I become so much like you? Your hunger for rectitude blossoms into rage the hot tears of mourning never shed for you before your twisted measurements the agony of denial the power of unshared secrets.


Written by Stephen Vincent Benet | Create an image from this poem

Winged Man

 The moon, a sweeping scimitar, dipped in the stormy straits, 
The dawn, a crimson cataract, burst through the eastern gates, 
The cliffs were robed in scarlet, the sands were cinnabar, 
Where first two men spread wings for flight and dared the hawk afar.
There stands the cunning workman, the crafty past all praise, The man who chained the Minotaur, the man who built the Maze.
His young son is beside him and the boy's face is a light, A light of dawn and wonder and of valor infinite.
Their great vans beat the cloven air, like eagles they mount up, Motes in the wine of morning, specks in a crystal cup, And lest his wings should melt apace old Daedalus flies low, But Icarus beats up, beats up, he goes where lightnings go.
He cares no more for warnings, he rushes through the sky, Braving the crags of ether, daring the gods on high, Black 'gainst the crimson sunset, golden o'er cloudy snows, With all Adventure in his heart the first winged man arose.
Dropping gold, dropping gold, where the mists of morning rolled, On he kept his way undaunted, though his breaths were stabs of cold, Through the mystery of dawning that no mortal may behold.
Now he shouts, now he sings in the rapture of his wings, And his great heart burns intenser with the strength of his desire, As he circles like a swallow, wheeling, flaming, gyre on gyre.
Gazing straight at the sun, half his pilgrimage is done, And he staggers for a moment, hurries on, reels backward, swerves In a rain of scattered feathers as he falls in broken curves.
Icarus, Icarus, though the end is piteous, Yet forever, yea, forever we shall see thee rising thus, See the first supernal glory, not the ruin hideous.
You were Man, you who ran farther than our eyes can scan, Man absurd, gigantic, eager for impossible Romance, Overthrowing all Hell's legions with one warped and broken lance.
On the highest steeps of Space he will have his dwelling-place, In those far, terrific regions where the cold comes down like Death Gleams the red glint of his pinions, smokes the vapor of his breath.
Floating downward, very clear, still the echoes reach the ear Of a little tune he whistles and a little song he sings, Mounting, mounting still, triumphant, on his torn and broken wings!
Written by Hilaire Belloc | Create an image from this poem

Heroic Poem in Praise of Wine

 To exalt, enthrone, establish and defend,
To welcome home mankind's mysterious friend
Wine, true begetter of all arts that be;
Wine, privilege of the completely free;
Wine the recorder; wine the sagely strong;
Wine, bright avenger of sly-dealing wrong,
Awake, Ausonian Muse, and sing the vineyard song!

Sing how the Charioteer from Asia came,
And on his front the little dancing flame
Which marked the God-head.
Sing the Panther-team, The gilded Thrysus twirling, and the gleam Of cymbals through the darkness.
Sing the drums.
He comes; the young renewer of Hellas comes! The Seas await him.
Those Aegean Seas Roll from the dawning, ponderous, ill at ease, In lifts of lead, whose cresting hardly breaks To ghostly foam, when suddenly there awakes A mountain glory inland.
All the skies Are luminous; and amid the sea bird cries The mariner hears a morning breeze arise.
Then goes the Pageant forward.
The sea-way Silvers the feet of that august array Trailing above the waters, through the airs; And as they pass a wind before them bears The quickening word, the influence magical.
The Islands have received it, marble-tall; The long shores of the mainland.
Something fills The warm Euboean combes, the sacred hills Of Aulis and of Argos.
Still they move Touching the City walls, the Temple grove, Till, far upon the horizon-glint, a gleam Of light, of trembling light, revealed they seem Turned to a cloud, but to a cloud that shines, And everywhere as they pass, the Vines! The Vines! The Vines, the conquering Vines! And the Vine breaths Her savour through the upland, empty heaths Of treeless wastes; the Vines have come to where The dark Pelasgian steep defends the lair Of the wolf's hiding; to the empty fields By Aufidus, the dry campaign that yields No harvest for the husbandman, but now Shall bear a nobler foison than the plough; To where, festooned along the tall elm trees, Tendrils are mirrored in Tyrrhenian seas; To where the South awaits them; even to where Stark, African informed of burning air, Upturned to Heaven the broad Hipponian plain Extends luxurious and invites the main.
Guelma's a mother: barren Thaspsa breeds; And northward in the valleys, next the meads That sleep by misty river banks, the Vines Have struck to spread below the solemn pines.
The Vines are on the roof-trees.
All the Shrines And Homes of men are consecrate with Vines.
And now the task of that triumphant day Has reached to victory.
In the reddening ray With all his train, from hard Iberian lands Fulfilled, apparent, that Creator stands Halted on Atlas.
Far Beneath him, far, The strength of Ocean darkening and the star Beyond all shores.
There is a silence made.
It glorifies: and the gigantic shade Of Hercules adores him from the West.
Dead Lucre: burnt Ambition: Wine is best.
But what are these that from the outer murk Of dense mephitic vapours creeping lurk To breathe foul airs from that corrupted well Which oozes slime along the floor of Hell? These are the stricken palsied brood of sin In whose vile veins, poor, poisonous and thin, Decoctions of embittered hatreds crawl: These are the Water-Drinkers, cursed all! On what gin-sodden Hags, what flaccid sires Bred these White Slugs from what exhaust desires? In what close prison's horror were their wiles Watched by what tyrant power with evil smiles; Or in what caverns, blocked from grace and air Received they, then, the mandates of despair? What! Must our race, our tragic race, that roam All exiled from our first, and final, home: That in one moment of temptation lost Our heritage, and now wander, hunger-tost Beyond the Gates (still speaking with our eyes For ever of remembered Paradise), Must we with every gift accepted, still, With every joy, receive attendant ill? Must some lewd evil follow all our good And muttering dog our brief beatitude? A primal doom, inexorable, wise, Permitted, ordered, even these to rise.
Even in the shadow of so bright a Lord Must swarm and propagate the filthy horde Debased, accursed I say, abhorrent and abhorred.
Accursed and curse-bestowing.
For whosoe'er Shall suffer their contagion, everywhere Falls from the estate of man and finds his end To the mere beverage of the beast condemned.
For such as these in vain the Rhine has rolled Imperial centuries by hills of gold; For such as these the flashing Rhone shall rage In vain its lightning through the Hermitage Or level-browed divine Touraine receive The tribute of her vintages at eve.
For such as these Burgundian heats in vain Swell the rich slope or load the empurpled plain.
Bootless for such as these the mighty task Of bottling God the Father in a flask And leading all Creation down distilled To one small ardent sphere immensely filled.
With memories empty, with experience null, With vapid eye-balls meaningless and dull They pass unblest through the unfruitful light; And when we open the bronze doors of Night, When we in high carousal, we reclined, Spur up to Heaven the still ascending mind, Pass with the all inspiring, to and fro, The torch of genius and the Muse's glow, They, lifeless, stare at vacancy alone Or plan mean traffic, or repeat their moan.
We, when repose demands us, welcomed are In young white arms, like our great Exemplar Who, wearied with creation, takes his rest And sinks to sleep on Ariadne's breast.
They through the darkness into darkness press Despised, abandoned and companionless.
And when the course of either's sleep has run We leap to life like heralds of the sun; We from the couch in roseate mornings gay Salute as equals the exultant day While they, the unworthy, unrewarded, they The dank despisers of the Vine, arise To watch grey dawns and mourn indifferent skies.
Forget them! Form the Dionysian ring And pulse the ground, and Io, Io, sing.
Father Lenaean, to whom our strength belongs, Our loves, our wars, our laughter and our songs, Remember our inheritance, who praise Your glory in these last unhappy days When beauty sickens and a muddied robe Of baseness fouls the universal globe.
Though all the Gods indignant and their train Abandon ruined man, do thou remain! By thee the vesture of our life was made, The Embattled Gate, the lordly Colonnade, The woven fabric's gracious hues, the sound Of trumpets, and the quivering fountain-round, And, indestructible, the Arch, and, high, The Shaft of Stone that stands against the sky, And, last, the guardian-genius of them, Rhyme, Come from beyond the world to conquer time: All these are thine, Lenaean.
By thee do seers the inward light discern; By thee the statue lives, the Gods return; By thee the thunder and the falling foam Of loud Acquoria's torrent call to Rome; Alba rejoices in a thousand springs, Gensano laughs, and Orvieto sings.
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But, Ah! With Orvieto, with that name Of dark, Eturian, subterranean flame The years dissolve.
I am standing in that hour Of majesty Septembral, and the power Which swells the clusters when the nights are still With autumn stars on Orvieto hill.
Had these been mine, Ausonian Muse, to know The large contented oxen heaving slow; To count my sheaves at harvest; so to spend Perfected days in peace until the end; With every evening's dust of gold to hear The bells upon the pasture height, the clear Full horn of herdsmen gathering in the kine To ancient byres in hamlets Appenine, And crown abundant age with generous ease: Had these, Ausonian Muse, had these, had these.
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But since I would not, since I could not stay, Let me remember even in this my day How, when the ephemeral vision's lure is past All, all, must face their Passion at the last Was there not one that did to Heaven complain How, driving through the midnight and the rain, He struck, the Atlantic seethe and surge before, Wrecked in the North along a lonely shore To make the lights of home and hear his name no more.
Was there not one that from a desperate field Rode with no guerdon but a rifted shield; A name disherited; a broken sword; Wounds unrenowned; battle beneath no Lord; Strong blows, but on the void, and toil without reward.
When from the waste of such long labour done I too must leave the grape-ennobling sun And like the vineyard worker take my way Down the long shadows of declining day, Bend on the sombre plain my clouded sight And leave the mountain to the advancing night, Come to the term of all that was mine own With nothingness before me, and alone; Then to what hope of answer shall I turn? Comrade-Commander whom I dared not earn, What said You then to trembling friends and few? "A moment, and I drink it with you new: But in my Father's Kingdom.
" So, my Friend, Let not Your cup desert me in the end.
But when the hour of mine adventure's near Just and benignant, let my youth appear Bearing a Chalice, open, golden, wide, With benediction graven on its side.
So touch my dying lip: so bridge that deep: So pledge my waking from the gift of sleep, And, sacramental, raise me the Divine: Strong brother in God and last companion, Wine.
Written by Rupert Brooke | Create an image from this poem

Dining-Room Tea

 When you were there, and you, and you, 
Happiness crowned the night; I too, 
Laughing and looking, one of all, 
I watched the quivering lamplight fall 
On plate and flowers and pouring tea
And cup and cloth; and they and we 
Flung all the dancing moments by 
With jest and glitter.
Lip and eye Flashed on the glory, shone and cried, Improvident, unmemoried; And fitfully and like a flame The light of laughter went and came.
Proud in their careless transience moved The changing faces that I loved.
Till suddenly, and otherwhence, I looked upon your innocence.
For lifted clear and still and strange From the dark woven flow of change Under a vast and starless sky I saw the immortal moment lie.
One Instant I, an instant, knew As God knows all.
And it and you I, above Time, oh, blind! could see In witless immortality.
I saw the marble cup; the tea, Hung on the air, an amber stream; I saw the fire’s unglittering gleam, The painted flame, the frozen smoke.
No more the flooding lamplight broke On flying eyes and lips and hair; But lay, but slept unbroken there, On stiller flesh, and body breathless, And lips and laughter stayed and deathless, And words on which no silence grew.
Light was more alive than you.
For suddenly, and otherwhence, I looked on your magnificence.
I saw the stillness and the light, And you, august, immortal, white, Holy and strange; and every glint Posture and jest and thought and tint Freed from the mask of transiency, Triumphant in eternity, Immote, immortal.
Dazed at length Human eyes grew, mortal strength Wearied; and Time began to creep.
Change closed about me like a sleep.
Light glinted on the eyes I loved.
The cup was filled.
The bodies moved.
The drifting petal came to ground.
The laughter chimed its perfect round.
The broken syllable was ended.
And I, so certain and so friended, How could I cloud, or how distress, The heaven of your unconsciousness? Or shake at Time’s sufficient spell, Stammering of lights unutterable? The eternal holiness of you, The timeless end, you never knew, The peace that lay, the light that shone.
You never knew that I had gone A million miles away, and stayed A million years.
The laughter played Unbroken round me; and the jest Flashed on.
And we that knew the best Down wonderful hours grew happier yet.
I sang at heart, and talked, and eat, And lived from laugh to laugh, I too, When you were there, and you, and you.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Nights Nothings Again

 WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?

Who picked a crimson cryptogram,
the tail light of a motor car turning a corner,
or the midnight sign of a chile con carne place,
or a man out of the ashes of false dawn muttering “hot-dog” to the night watchmen:
Is there a spieler who has spoken the word or taken the number of night’s nothings? am I the spieler? or you?

Is there a tired head
the night has not fed and rested
and kept on its neck and shoulders?

Is there a wish
of man to woman
and woman to man
the night has not written
and signed its name under?

Does the night forget
as a woman forgets?
and remember
as a woman remembers?

Who gave the night
this head of hair,
this gipsy head
calling: Come-on?

Who gave the night anything at all
and asked the night questions
and was laughed at?

Who asked the night
for a long soft kiss
and lost the half-way lips?
who picked a red lamp in a mist?

Who saw the night
fold its Mona Lisa hands
and sit half-smiling, half-sad,
nothing at all,
and everything,
all the world ?

Who saw the night
let down its hair
and shake its bare shoulders
and blow out the candles of the moon,
whispering, snickering,
cutting off the snicker .
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and sobbing .
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out of pillow-wet kisses and tears? Is the night woven of anything else than the secret wishes of women, the stretched empty arms of women? the hair of women with stars and roses? I asked the night these questions.
I heard the night asking me these questions.
I saw the night put these whispered nothings across the city dust and stones, across a single yellow sunflower, one stalk strong as a woman’s wrist; And the play of a light rain, the jig-time folly of a light rain, the creepers of a drizzle on the sidewalks for the policemen and the railroad men, for the home-goers and the homeless, silver fans and funnels on the asphalt, the many feet of a fog mist that crept away; I saw the night put these nothings across and the night wind came saying: Come-on: and the curve of sky swept off white clouds and swept on white stars over Battery to Bronx, scooped a sea of stars over Albany, Dobbs Ferry, Cape Horn, Constantinople.
I saw the night’s mouth and lips strange as a face next to mine on a pillow and now I know … as I knew always … the night is a lover of mine … I know the night is … everything.
I know the night is … all the world.
I have seen gold lamps in a lagoon play sleep and murmur with never an eyelash, never a glint of an eyelid, quivering in the water-shadows.
A taxi whizzes by, an owl car clutters, passengers yawn reading street signs, a bum on a park bench shifts, another bum keeps his majesty of stone stillness, the forty-foot split rocks of Central Park sleep the sleep of stone whalebacks, the cornices of the Metropolitan Art mutter their own nothings to the men with rolled-up collars on the top of a bus: Breaths of the sea salt Atlantic, breaths of two rivers, and a heave of hawsers and smokestacks, the swish of multiplied sloops and war dogs, the hesitant hoo-hoo of coal boats: among these I listen to Night calling: I give you what money can never buy: all other lovers change: all others go away and come back and go away again: I am the one you slept with last night.
I am the one you sleep with tonight and tomorrow night.
I am the one whose passion kisses keep your head wondering and your lips aching to sing one song never sung before at night’s gipsy head calling: Come-on.
These hands that slid to my neck and held me, these fingers that told a story, this gipsy head of hair calling: Come-on: can anyone else come along now and put across night’s nothings again? I have wanted kisses my heart stuttered at asking, I have pounded at useless doors and called my people fools.
I have staggered alone in a winter dark making mumble songs to the sting of a blizzard that clutched and swore.
It was the night in my blood: open dreaming night, night of tireless sheet-steel blue: The hands of God washing something, feet of God walking somewhere.
Written by Elizabeth Bishop | Create an image from this poem

Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals, please come flying, to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums descending out of the mackerel sky over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water, please come flying.
Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing.
The ships are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing countless little pellucid jellies in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Please come flying.
Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe trailing a sapphire highlight, with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots, with heaven knows how many angels all riding on the broad black brim of your hat, please come flying.
Bearing a musical inaudible abacus, a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons, please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan is all awash with morals this fine morning, so please come flying.
Mounting the sky with natural heroism, above the accidents, above the malignant movies, the taxicabs and injustices at large, while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears that simultaneously listen to a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer, please come flying.
For whom the grim museums will behave like courteous male bower-birds, for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait on the steps of the Public Library, eager to rise and follow through the doors up into the reading rooms, please come flying.
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping, or play at a game of constantly being wrong with a priceless set of vocabularies, or we can bravely deplore, but please please come flying.
With dynasties of negative constructions darkening and dying around you, with grammar that suddenly turns and shines like flocks of sandpipers flying, please come flying.
Come like a light in the white mackerel sky, come like a daytime comet with a long unnebulous train of words, from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning, please come flying.

Book: Shattered Sighs