10 Best Famous Grandmothers Poems

Here is a collection of the top 10 all-time best famous Grandmothers poems. This is a select list of the best famous Grandmothers poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Grandmothers poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of grandmothers poems.

• All Famous Grandmothers Poems

 either peace or happiness,
let it enfold you

when i was a young man
I felt these things were
dumb,unsophisticated.
I had bad blood,a twisted
mind, a pecarious
upbringing.

I was hard as granite,I
leered at the 
sun.
I trusted no man and
especially no
woman.

I was living a hell in
small rooms, I broke
things, smashed things,
walked through glass,
cursed.
I challenged everything,
was continually being
evicted,jailed,in and
out of fights,in and aout
of my mind.
women were something
to screw and rail
at,i had no male
freinds,

I changed jobs and
cities,I hated holidays,
babies,history,
newspapers, museums,
grandmothers,
marriage, movies,
spiders, garbagemen,
english accents,spain,
france,italy,walnuts and
the color 
orange.
algebra angred me,
opera sickened me,
charlie chaplin was a
fake
and flowers were for
pansies.

peace an happiness to me
were signs of
inferiority,
tenants of the weak
an
addled
mind.

but as I went on with
my alley fights,
my suicidal years,
my passage through
any number of 
women-it gradually
began to occur to
me
that I wasn't diffrent

from the
others, I was the same,

they were all fulsome
with hatred,
glossed over with petty
greivances,
the men I fought in
alleys had hearts of stone.
everybody was nudging,
inching, cheating for
some insignificant
advantage,
the lie was the
weapon and the
plot was
emptey,
darkness was the
dictator.

cautiously, I allowed
myself to feel good
at times.
I found moments of 
peace in cheap
rooms
just staring at the 
knobs of some
dresser
or listening to the
rain in the 
dark.
the less i needed
the better i 
felt.

maybe the other life had worn me 
down.
I no longer found
glamour
in topping somebody
in conversation.
or in mounting the
body of some poor
drunken female
whose life had 
slipped away into 
sorrow.

I could never accept
life as it was,
i could never gobble 
down all its
poisons
but there were parts,
tenous magic parts
open for the
asking.

I re formulated
I don't know when,
date,time,all
that
but the change
occured.
something in me
relaxed, smoothed
out.
i no longer had to 
prove that i was a 
man,

I did'nt have to prove
anything.

I began to see things:
coffe cups lined up
behind a counter in a 
cafe.
or a dog walking along
a sidewalk.
or the way the mouse
on my dresser top
stopped there
with its body,
its ears,
its nose,
it was fixed,
a bit of life
caught within itself
and its eyes looked 
at me
and they were
beautiful.
then- it was
gone.

I began to feel good,
I began to feel good
in the worst situations
and there were plenty
of those.
like say, the boss
behind his desk,
he is going to have
to fire me.

I've missed too many 
days.
he is dressed in a
suit, necktie, glasses,
he says, "i am going
to have to let you go"

"it's all right" i tell
him.

He must do what he
must do, he has a 
wife, a house, children.
expenses, most probably
a girlfreind.

I am sorry for him
he is caught.

I walk onto the blazing
sunshine.
the whole day is
mine
temporailiy,
anyhow.

(the whole world is at the
throat of the world,
everybody feels angry,
short-changed, cheated,
everybody is despondent,
dissillusioned)

I welcomed shots of
peace, tattered shards of
happiness.

I embraced that stuff
like the hottest number,
like high heels,breasts,
singing,the
works.

(dont get me wrong,
there is such a thing as cockeyed optimism
that overlooks all
basic problems justr for
the sake of
itself-
this is a sheild and a 
sickness.)

The knife got near my
throat again,
I almost turned on the
gas
again
but when the good
moments arrived
again
I did'nt fight them off
like an alley 
adversary.
I let them take me,
i luxuriated in them,
I bade them welcome
home.
I even looked into
the mirror
once having thought
myself to be
ugly,
I now liked what
I saw,almost
handsome,yes,
a bit ripped and
ragged,
scares,lumps,
odd turns,
but all in all,
not too bad,
almost handsome,
better at least than
some of those movie
star faces
like the cheeks of
a babys
butt.

and finally I discovered
real feelings fo
others,
unhearleded,
like latley,
like this morning,
as I was leaving,
for the track,
i saw my wif in bed,
just the 
shape of
her head there
(not forgetting
centuries of the living
and the dead and
the dying,
the pyarimids,
Mozart dead
but his music still 
there in the
room, weeds growing,
the earth turning,
the toteboard waiting for
me)
I saw the shape of my
wife's head,
she so still,
i ached for her life,
just being there
under the 
covers.

i kissed her in the,
forehead,
got down the stairway,
got outside,
got into my marvelous
car,
fixed the seatbelt,
backed out the
drive.
feeling warm to
the fingertips,
down to my
foot on the gas
pedal,
I entered the world
once
more,
drove down the 
hill
past the houses
full and emptey
of
people,
i saw the mailman,
honked,
he waved
back
at me.

(Thinking of Lorraine Hansberry)


We must say it all, and as clearly
Trying to bury us.
As we can. For, even before we are dead,


Were we black? Were we women? Were we gay?
Were we the wrong shade of black? Were we yellow?
Did we, God forbid, love the wrong person, country?
Or politics? Were we Agnes Smedley or John Brown?


But, most of all, did we write exactly what we saw,
As clearly as we could? Were we unsophisticated
Enough to cry and scream?


Well, then, they will fill our eyes,
Our ears, our noses and our mouths
With the mud
Of oblivion. They will chew up
Our fingers in the night. They will pick
Their teeth with our pens. They will sabotage
Both our children
And our art.


Because when we show what we see,
They will discern the inevitable:
We do not worship them.


We do not worship them.
We do not worship what they have made.
We do not trust them.


We do not believe what they say.
We do not love their efficiency.
Or their power plants.
We do not love their factories.
Or their smog.
We do not love their television programs.
Or their radioactive leaks.
We find their papers boring.
We do not worship their cars.
We do not worship their blondes.
We do not worship their penises.
We do not think much
Of their Renaissance
We are indifferent to England.
We have grave doubts about their brains.


In short, we who write, paint, sculpt, dance
Or sing
Share the intelligence and thus the fate
Of all our people
In this land.
We are not different from them,
Neither above nor below,
Outside nor inside.
We are the same.
And we do not worship them.


We do not worship them.
We do not worship their movies.
We do not worship their songs.


We do not think their newscasts
Cast the news.
We do not admire their president.
We know why the White House is white.
We do not find their children irresistible;
We do not agree they should inherit the earth.


But lately you have begun to help them
Bury us. You who said: King was just a womanizer;
Malcom, just a thug; Sojourner, folksy; Hansberry,
A traitor (or whore, depending); Fannie Lou Hamer,
merely spunky; Zora Hurston, Nella Larsen, Toomer:
reactionary, brainwashed, spoiled by whitefolks, minor;
Agnes Smedley, a spy.


I look into your eyes;
You are throwing in the dirt.
You, standing in the grave
With me. Stop it!


Each one must pull one.


Look, I, temporarily on the rim
Of the grave,
Have grasped my mother's hand
My father's leg.
There is the hand of Robeson
Langston's thigh
Zora's arm and hair
Your grandfather's lifted chin
And lynched woman's elbow
What you've tried to forget
Of your grandmother's frown.


Each one, pull one back into the sun


We who have stood over
So many graves
Know that no matter what they do
All of us must live
Or none. 

 Every month or so, Sundays, we walked the line,
The limit and the boundary. Past the sweet gum
Superb above the cabin, along the wall—
Stones gathered from the level field nearby
When first we cleared it. (Angry bumblebees
Stung the two mules. They kicked. Thirteen, I ran.)
And then the field: thread-leaf maple, deciduous
Magnolia, hybrid broom, and, further down,
In light shade, one Franklinia Alatamaha
In solstice bloom, all white, most graciously.
On the sunnier slope, the wild plums that my mother
Later would make preserves of, to give to friends
Or sell, in autumn, with the foxgrape, quince,
Elderberry, and muscadine. Around
The granite overhang, moist den of foxes;
Gradually up a long hill, high in pine,
Park-like, years of dry needles on the ground,
And dogwood, slopes the settlers terraced; pine
We cut at Christmas, berries, hollies, anise,
And cones for sale in Mister Haymore’s yard
In town, below the Courthouse Square. James Haymore,
One of the two good teachers at Boys’ High,
Ironic and demanding, chemistry;
Mary Lou Culver taught us English: essays,
Plot summaries, outlines, meters, kinds of clauses
(Noun, adjective, and adverb, five at a time),
Written each day and then revised, and she
Up half the night to read them once again
Through her pince-nez, under a single lamp.
Across the road, on a steeper hill, the settlers
Set a house, unpainted, the porch fallen in,
The road a red clay strip without a bridge,
A shallow stream that liked to overflow.
Oliver Brand’s mules pulled our station wagon
Out of the gluey mire, earth’s rust. Then, here
And there, back from the road, the specimen
Shrubs and small trees my father planted, some
Taller than we were, some in bloom, some berried,
And some we still brought water to. We always
Paused at the weed-filled hole beside the beech
That, one year, brought forth beech nuts by the thousands,
A hole still reminiscent of the man
Chewing tobacco in among his whiskers
My father happened on, who, discovered, told
Of dreaming he should dig there for the gold
And promised to give half of what he found. 

During the wars with Germany and Japan,
Descendents of the settlers, of Oliver Brand
And of that man built Flying Fortresses
For Lockheed, in Atlanta; now they build
Brick mansions in the woods they left, with lawns
To paved and lighted streets, azaleas, camellias
Blooming among the pines and tulip trees—
Mercedes Benz and Cadillac Republicans.
There was another stream further along 
Divided through a marsh, lined by the fence
We stretched to posts with Mister Garner’s help
The time he needed cash for his son’s bail
And offered all his place. A noble spring
Under the oak root cooled his milk and butter.
He called me “honey,” working with us there
(My father bought three acres as a gift),
His wife pale, hair a country orange, voice
Uncanny, like a ghost’s, through the open door
Behind her, chickens scratching on the floor.
Barred Rocks, our chickens; one, a rooster, splendid
Sliver and grey, red comb and long sharp spurs,
Once chased Aunt Jennie as far as the daphne bed
The two big king snakes were familiars of.
My father’s dog would challenge him sometimes
To laughter and applause. Once, in Stone Mountain,
Travelers, stopped for gas, drove off with Smokey;
Angrily, grievingly, leaving his work, my father
Traced the car and found them way far south,
Had them arrested and, bringing Smokey home,
Was proud as Sherlock Holmes, and happier.
Above the spring, my sister’s cats, black Amy,
Grey Junior, down to meet us. The rose trees,
Domestic, Asiatic, my father’s favorites.
The bridge, marauding dragonflies, the bullfrog,
Camellias cracked and blackened by the freeze,
Bay tree, mimosa, mountain laurel, apple, 
Monkey pine twenty feet high, banana shrub,
The owls’ tall pine curved like a flattened S.
The pump house Mort and I built block by block,
Smooth concrete floor, roof pale aluminum
Half-covered by a clematis, the pump 
Thirty feet down the mountain’s granite foot. 

Mort was the hired man sent to us by Fortune,
Childlike enough to lead us. He brought home,
Although he could not even drive a tractor,
Cheated, a worthless car, which we returned.
When, at the trial to garnishee his wages,
Frank Guess, the judge, Grandmother’s longtime neighbor,
Whose children my mother taught in Cradle Roll,
Heard Mort’s examination, he broke in
As if in disbelief on the bank’s attorneys:
“Gentlemen, must we continue this charade?”
Finally, past the compost heap, the garden,
Tomatoes and sweet corn for succotash,
Okra for frying, Kentucky Wonders, limas,
Cucumbers, squashes, leeks heaped round with soil,
Lavender, dill, parsley, and rosemary,
Tithonia and zinnias between the rows;
The greenhouse by the rock wall, used for cuttings
In late spring, frames to grow them strong for planting
Through winter into summer. Early one morning
Mort called out, lying helpless by the bridge.
His ashes we let drift where the magnolia
We planted as a stem divides the path
The others lie, too young, at Silver Hill,
Except my mother. Ninety-five, she lives
Three thousand miles away, beside the bare
Pacific, in rooms that overlook the Mission,
The Riviera, and the silver range 
La Cumbre east. Magnolia grandiflora
And one druidic live oak guard the view. 
Proudly around the walls, she shows her paintings
Of twenty years ago: the great oak’s arm
Extended, Zeuslike, straight and strong, wisteria
Tangled among the branches, amaryllis
Around the base; her cat, UC, at ease
In marigolds; the weeping cherry, pink
And white arms like a blessing to the blue
Bird feeder Mort made; cabin, scarlet sweet gum
Superb when tribes migrated north and south.
Alert, still quick of speech, a little blind,
Active, ready for laughter, open to fear,
Pity, and wonder that such things may be,
Some Sundays, I think, she must walk the line,
Aunt Jennie, too, if she were still alive,
And Eleanor, whose story is untold,
Their presences like muses, prompting me
In my small study, all listening to the sea,
All of one mind, the true posterity.

 Millions of babies watching the skies
Bellies swollen, with big round eyes
On Jessore Road--long bamboo huts
Noplace to **** but sand channel ruts

Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go

One Million aunts are dying for bread
One Million uncles lamenting the dead
Grandfather millions homeless and sad
Grandmother millions silently mad

Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A Million girls vomit & groan
Millions of families hopeless alone

Millions of souls nineteenseventyone
homeless on Jessore road under grey sun
A million are dead, the million who can
Walk toward Calcutta from East Pakistan

Taxi September along Jessore Road
Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load
past watery fields thru rain flood ruts
Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts

Wet processions Families walk
Stunted boys big heads don't talk
Look bony skulls & silent round eyes
Starving black angels in human disguise

Mother squats weeping & points to her sons
Standing thin legged like elderly nuns
small bodied hands to their mouths in prayer
Five months small food since they settled there

on one floor mat with small empty pot
Father lifts up his hands at their lot
Tears come to their mother's eye
Pain makes mother Maya cry

Two children together in palmroof shade
Stare at me no word is said
Rice ration, lentils one time a week
Milk powder for warweary infants meek

No vegetable money or work for the man
Rice lasts four days eat while they can
Then children starve three days in a row
and vomit their next food unless they eat slow.

On Jessore road Mother wept at my knees
Bengali tongue cried mister Please
Identity card torn up on the floor
Husband still waits at the camp office door

Baby at play I was washing the flood
Now they won't give us any more food
The pieces are here in my celluloid purse
Innocent baby play our death curse 

Two policemen surrounded by thousands of boys
Crowded waiting their daily bread joys
Carry big whistles & long bamboo sticks
to whack them in line They play hungry tricks

Breaking the line and jumping in front 
Into the circle sneaks one skinny runt
Two brothers dance forward on the mud stage
Teh gaurds blow their whistles & chase them in rage

Why are these infants massed in this place
Laughing in play & pushing for space
Why do they wait here so cheerful & dread
Why this is the House where they give children bread

The man in the bread door Cries & comes out
Thousands of boys and girls Take up his shout
Is it joy? is it prayer? "No more bread today"
Thousands of Children at once scream "Hooray!"

Run home to tents where elders await
Messenger children with bread from the state
No bread more today! & and no place to squat
Painful baby, sick **** he has got.

Malnutrition skulls thousands for months
Dysentery drains bowels all at once
Nurse shows disease card Enterostrep
Suspension is wanting or else chlorostrep

Refugee camps in hospital shacks
Newborn lay naked on mother's thin laps
Monkeysized week old Rheumatic babe eye
Gastoenteritis Blood Poison thousands must die

September Jessore Road rickshaw
50,000 souls in one camp I saw
Rows of bamboo huts in the flood 
Open drains, & wet families waiting for food

Border trucks flooded, food cant get past,
American Angel machine please come fast!
Where is Ambassador Bunker today?
Are his Helios machinegunning children at play?

Where are the helicopters of U.S. AID?
Smuggling dope in Bangkok's green shade.
Where is America's Air Force of Light?
Bombing North Laos all day and all night?

Where are the President's Armies of Gold?
Billionaire Navies merciful Bold?
Bringing us medicine food and relief?
Napalming North Viet Nam and causing more grief?

Where are our tears? Who weeps for the pain?
Where can these families go in the rain?
Jessore Road's children close their big eyes
Where will we sleep when Our Father dies?

Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?
Who can bring bread to this **** flood foul'd lair?
Millions of children alone in the rain!
Millions of children weeping in pain!

Ring O ye tongues of the world for their woe
Ring out ye voices for Love we don't know
Ring out ye bells of electrical pain
Ring in the conscious of America brain

How many children are we who are lost
Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?
What are our souls that we have lost care?
Ring out ye musics and weep if you dare--

Cries in the mud by the thatch'd house sand drain
Sleeps in huge pipes in the wet ****-field rain
waits by the pump well, Woe to the world!
whose children still starve in their mother's arms curled.

Is this what I did to myself in the past?
What shall I do Sunil Poet I asked?
Move on and leave them without any coins?
What should I care for the love of my loins?

What should we care for our cities and cars?
What shall we buy with our Food Stamps on Mars?
How many millions sit down in New York
& sup this night's table on bone & roast pork?

How many millions of beer cans are tossed
in Oceans of Mother? How much does She cost?
Cigar gasolines and asphalt car dreams
Stinking the world and dimming star beams--

Finish the war in your breast with a sigh
Come tast the tears in your own Human eye
Pity us millions of phantoms you see
Starved in Samsara on planet TV

How many millions of children die more
before our Good Mothers perceive the Great Lord?
How many good fathers pay tax to rebuild 
Armed forces that boast the children they've killed?

How many souls walk through Maya in pain
How many babes in illusory pain?
How many families hollow eyed lost?
How many grandmothers turning to ghost?

How many loves who never get bread?
How many Aunts with holes in their head?
How many sisters skulls on the ground?
How many grandfathers make no more sound?

How many fathers in woe
How many sons nowhere to go?
How many daughters nothing to eat?
How many uncles with swollen sick feet?

Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children nowhere to go

 New York, November 14-16, 1971

 In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985


The strange and wonderful are too much with us.
The protea of the antipodes—a great,
globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom—
for sale in the supermarket! We are in
our decadence, we are not entitled.
What have we done to deserve
all the produce of the tropics—
this fiery trove, the largesse of it
heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed
and crested, standing like troops at attention,
these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons
grown sumptuous with stoop labor?

The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us
before there is a yen or a need for it. The green-
grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea.
Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly
fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are
disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias
fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli
likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson;
as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower
of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these
bachelor's buttons. But it isn't the railway embankments
their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it's

a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos,
snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies,
in my grandmother's garden: a prairie childhood,
the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid,
unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses,
their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered
here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas
on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch
of living matter, sown and tended by women,
nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful,
beneath whose hands what had been alien begins,
as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous.

But at this remove what I think of as
strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan
on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom,
a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above—
is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift
of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood.
Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel.
All that we know, that we're 
made of, is motion.

 Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand-
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st and 2nd), nieces, and nephews.They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk.I know
their dark eyes, they know mine.I know their style,
they know mine.I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee.

I have at one time or another been in love with my mother,
1 grandmother, 2 sisters, 2 aunts (1 went to the asylum),
and 5 cousins.I am now in love with a 7-yr-old niece
(she sends me letters in large block print, and
her picture is the only one that smiles at me).

I have the same name as 1 grandfather, 3 cousins, 3 nephews,
and 1 uncle. The uncle disappeared when he was 15, just took
off and caught a freight (they say).He's discussed each year
when the family has a reunion, he causes uneasiness in
the clan, he is an empty space.My father's mother, who is 93
and who keeps the Family Bible with everbody's birth dates
(and death dates) in it, always mentions him.There is no
place in her Bible for "whereabouts unknown."

 In the middle of our porridge plates
There was a blue butterfly painted
And each morning we tried who should reach the
butterfly first.
Then the Grandmother said: "Do not eat the poor
butterfly."
That made us laugh.
Always she said it and always it started us laughing.
It seemed such a sweet little joke.
I was certain that one fine morning
The butterfly would fly out of our plates,
Laughing the teeniest laugh in the world,
And perch on the Grandmother's lap.

 [How different people and different animals look upon the moon: showing that each creature finds in it his own mood and disposition]


The Old Horse in the City

The moon's a peck of corn. It lies 
Heaped up for me to eat. 
I wish that I might climb the path 
And taste that supper sweet. 

Men feed me straw and scanty grain 
And beat me till I'm sore. 
Some day I'll break the halter-rope 
And smash the stable-door, 

Run down the street and mount the hill 
Just as the corn appears. 
I've seen it rise at certain times 
For years and years and years. 


What the Hyena Said

The moon is but a golden skull, 
She mounts the heavens now, 
And Moon-Worms, mighty Moon-Worms 
Are wreathed around her brow. 

The Moon-Worms are a doughty race: 
They eat her gray and golden face. 
Her eye-sockets dead, and molding head: 
These caverns are their dwelling-place. 

The Moon-Worms, serpents of the skies, 
From the great hollows of her eyes 
Behold all souls, and they are wise: 
With tiny, keen and icy eyes, 
Behold how each man sins and dies. 

When Earth in gold-corruption lies 
Long dead, the moon-worm butterflies 
On cyclone wings will reach this place — 
Yea, rear their brood on earth's dead face. 


What the Snow Man Said

The Moon's a snowball. See the drifts 
Of white that cross the sphere. 
The Moon's a snowball, melted down 
A dozen times a year. 

Yet rolled again in hot July 
When all my days are done 
And cool to greet the weary eye 
After the scorching sun. 

The moon's a piece of winter fair 
Renewed the year around, 
Behold it, deathless and unstained, 
Above the grimy ground! 

It rolls on high so brave and white 
Where the clear air-rivers flow, 
Proclaiming Christmas all the time 
And the glory of the snow! 


What the Scare-crow Said

The dim-winged spirits of the night 
Do fear and serve me well. 
They creep from out the hedges of 
The garden where I dwell. 

I wave my arms across the walk. 
The troops obey the sign, 
And bring me shimmering shadow-robes 
And cups of cowslip-wine. 

Then dig a treasure called the moon, 
A very precious thing, 
And keep it in the air for me 
Because I am a King. 


What Grandpa Mouse Said

The moon's a holy owl-queen. 
She keeps them in a jar 
Under her arm till evening, 
Then sallies forth to war. 

She pours the owls upon us. 
They hoot with horrid noise 
And eat the naughty mousie-girls 
And wicked mousie-boys. 

So climb the moonvine every night 
And to the owl-queen pray: 
Leave good green cheese by moonlit trees 
For her to take away. 

And never squeak, my children, 
Nor gnaw the smoke-house door: 
The owl-queen then will love us 
And send her birds no more. 


The Beggar Speaks

"What Mister Moon Said to Me."

Come, eat the bread of idleness, 
Come, sit beside the spring: 
Some of the flowers will keep awake, 
Some of the birds will sing. 

Come, eat the bread no man has sought 
For half a hundred years: 
Men hurry so they have no griefs, 
Nor even idle tears: 

They hurry so they have no loves: 
They cannot curse nor laugh — 
Their hearts die in their youth with neither 
Grave nor epitaph. 

My bread would make them careless, 
And never quite on time — 
Their eyelids would be heavy, 
Their fancies full of rhyme: 

Each soul a mystic rose-tree, 
Or a curious incense tree: 
Come, eat the bread of idleness, 
Said Mister Moon to me. 


What the Forester Said

The moon is but a candle-glow 
That flickers thro' the gloom: 
The starry space, a castle hall: 
And Earth, the children's room, 
Where all night long the old trees stand 
To watch the streams asleep: 
Grandmothers guarding trundle-beds: 
Good shepherds guarding sheep.

 In our family, there were two saints,
my aunt and my grandmother.
But their lives were different.

My grandmother's was tranquil, even at the end.
She was like a person walking in calm water;
for some reason
the sea couldn't bring itself to hurt her.
When my aunt took the same path,
the waves broke over her, they attacked her,
which is how the Fates respond
to a true spiritual nature.

My grandmother was cautious, conservative:
that's why she escaped suffering.
My aunt's escaped nothing;
each time the sea retreats, someone she loves is taken away.

Still she won't experience
the sea as evil. To her, it is what it is:
where it touches land, it must turn to violence.

 ("Dors-tu? mère de notre mère.") 
 
 {III., 1823.} 
 
 "To die—to sleep."—SHAKESPEARE. 


 Still asleep! We have been since the noon thus alone. 
 Oh, the hours we have ceased to number! 
 Wake, grandmother!—speechless say why thou art grown. 
 Then, thy lips are so cold!—the Madonna of stone 
 Is like thee in thy holy slumber. 
 We have watched thee in sleep, we have watched thee at prayer, 
 But what can now betide thee? 
 Like thy hours of repose all thy orisons were, 
 And thy lips would still murmur a blessing whene'er 
 Thy children stood beside thee. 
 
 Now thine eye is unclosed, and thy forehead is bent 
 O'er the hearth, where ashes smoulder; 
 And behold, the watch-lamp will be speedily spent. 
 Art thou vexed? have we done aught amiss? Oh, relent! 
 But—parent, thy hands grow colder! 
 Say, with ours wilt thou let us rekindle in thine 
 The glow that has departed? 
 Wilt thou sing us some song of the days of lang syne? 
 Wilt thou tell us some tale, from those volumes divine, 
 Of the brave and noble-hearted? 
 
 Of the dragon who, crouching in forest green glen, 
 Lies in wait for the unwary— 
 Of the maid who was freed by her knight from the den 
 Of the ogre, whose club was uplifted, but then 
 Turned aside by the wand of a fairy? 
 Wilt thou teach us spell-words that protect from all harm, 
 And thoughts of evil banish? 
 What goblins the sign of the cross may disarm? 
 What saint it is good to invoke? and what charm 
 Can make the demon vanish? 
 
 Or unfold to our gaze thy most wonderful book, 
 So feared by hell and Satan; 
 At its hermits and martyrs in gold let us look, 
 At the virgins, and bishops with pastoral crook, 
 And the hymns and the prayers in Latin. 
 Oft with legends of angels, who watch o'er the young, 
 Thy voice was wont to gladden; 
 Have thy lips yet no language—no wisdom thy tongue? 
 Oh, see! the light wavers, and sinking, bath flung 
 On the wall forms that sadden. 
 
 Wake! awake! evil spirits perhaps may presume 
 To haunt thy holy dwelling; 
 Pale ghosts are, perhaps, stealing into the room— 
 Oh, would that the lamp were relit! with the gloom 
 These fearful thoughts dispelling. 
 Thou hast told us our parents lie sleeping beneath 
 The grass, in a churchyard lonely: 
 Now, thine eyes have no motion, thy mouth has no breath, 
 And thy limbs are all rigid! Oh, say, Is this death, 
 Or thy prayer or thy slumber only? 
 
 ENVOY. 
 
 Sad vigil they kept by that grandmother's chair, 
 Kind angels hovered o'er them— 
 And the dead-bell was tolled in the hamlet—and there, 
 On the following eve, knelt that innocent pair, 
 With the missal-book before them. 
 
 "FATHER PROUT" (FRANK S. MAHONY).