Woman, if some one from your house had died
Would you not put a flower on his grave?
Yet when youth died in you—
The best friend you ever knew—
Did you, in memory of its cleanly pride,
So much as keep the dead leaves off its grave?

Dearer than father, mother, sister, lover,
Youth died in you and made your body a grave.
And yet day after day
You go your sleepy way—
Blind to the creeping weeds that soon may cover
What might have been a green and useful grave.