Short Poems

As the spring
wells up soundlessly,
as the dew forms
without sound,
just so am I
drenched, and though
the electric currents touch me
I am held by silence.

Even love dies of starvation;
heart stays cold after a drink
of warm water—
The sickness grows worse, my love;
O my love, you have closed your eyes!

Even to the end of the earth
even to the edge of the heavens
even to a house as far as
the world beyond,
love carries sun in the morning;
wind in the evening.

When a woman is without love,
she doesn't know how to
become good and hopeful.

When a woman is in love,
she dies of thirst

Small ferns up-coming through the mossy green,
Up-curling and springing,
See trees circling round them,
And the straight brook like a lily-stem:
Hear the water laughing
At the stern old pine-tree
Who keeps sighing to himself all day long
What's the use! What's the use!

Quite unknown to the passers-by—
The chestnut-flowers by your house.

Good-by, good-by,
I bid you now, my friend;
And though 'tis hard to say the word,
To destiny I bend.

And not alone seems she from pillared halls
To look forth on the night—so to note the sky
Bending above Fidena's moon-tipt walls
And mirrored in the flood that wanders by
And where beside her in the chamber falls
The window's clear reflection broad & high
She deems another stands, that half-checked breath
Now tells of wakened thought that know[s] not death

Safe for Democracy, they said.
True; for our noblest youth are dead.

Let but another world-war kill
The rest, it will be safer still.

Mortal though I bé, yea ephemeral, if but a moment
I gaze up to the night's starry domain of heaven,
Then no longer on earth I stand; I touch the Creator,
And my lively spirit drinketh immortality.