Short Poems

Good, better, best,
Never let it rest,
Till your good is better
And your better best.

As we dance round a-ring-a-ring,
A maiden goes a-maying;
And here a flower, and there a flower,
Through mead and meadow straying:
O gentle one, why dost thou weep?--
Silver to spend with; gold to keep;
Till spin the green round World asleep,
And Heaven its dews by staying.

Twice I bow before my friend's picture:
the picture smiles at me.
Nothing's changed, it says,
just a realignment of body atoms.
All's as it was, it says:
the rain dripping outside the mortuary,
the mourners drinking and playing cards next door,
the flip-flop of slippers bound for the loo.

Why these inquiries make,
Where charity may flow?
Cast in the flood thy cake,—
Its eater, who will know?

“W HEREFORE is truth so far from our eyes,
Buried as though in a distant land?”

None at the proper moment are wise!
Could they properly understand,
Truth would appear in her own sweet guise,
Beauteous, gentle, and close at hand.

When the heavy-laden sigh,
Deeming help and hope gone by,
Oft, with healing power is heard,
Comfort-fraught, a kindly word.

We have a pritty witty king
And whose word no man relys on:
He never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one.

Upon the work of Walter Landor
I am unfit to write with candor.
If you can read it, well and good;
But as for me, I never could.

If sight bee not beguilde,
And eyes right playe their part,
This flowre is not of arte,
But is faire nature's child:
And though when Phœbus from vs is exilde,
Shee doth not locke her leaues, his losse to mone,
No wonder earth hath now moe sunnes than one.

Traversing every sea on his homeward journey, Ulysses
Past Charybdis steered only on Scylla to fall.
Subject to perils of earth and the horrible tumults of ocean,
Lay his wandering course, guided him even to hell,
Till in the end he was borne asleep to his Ithacan island;
Yet his awakening eyes failed to acknowledge his home!