Short Poems

Because no notice-board was nailed
With clear directing words
That none might stray,
Only my heart could find me out the way
As surely as the migratory birds.
But my heart failed.

I LIVE among the Pigmies and the Cranes,
Nor care a straw who loses or who gains.
Peel doffs the harness, Russell puts it on,
The late Sir Robert is the live Lord John,
Close in the corner sits the abler man,
But show me the more tricky if you can.

Fishermen's fires glitter and fade,
mountains appear, then disappear behind the clouds.
The moon rises, a wind starts to blow:
each of these changes lasts only an instant.

Far happier are the dead, methinks, than they
Who look for death, and fear it ev'ry day.

So remote the mountains,
deer fearless enough
to come right up close
tell me how far I am
from the outside world!

So remote the mountains,
on a carpet of moss
a monkey sits,
unconcernedly

Wondering if it's a winter shower,
I wake in my bed
and hear them—
the leaves that
couldn't withstand the storm

In the cold forbidding capital
he learns
to write poetry

From the four eaves a thousand drops drip,
the snow on ten thousand tiles melting.
On my pillow I thought I heard rain,
not knowing the morning sun had turned bright red.

Love hath a name of Death:
He gives a breath
And takes away.
Lo we beneath his sway
Grow like a flower;
To bloom an hour,
To droop a day,
And fade away.