Short Poems

You are no friend of mine
For I am poor,
Black,
Ignorant and slow,—
Not your kind.
You yourself
Have told me so,—
No friend of mine.

There was an old man in a Tonga,
Who said, ‘If this ride lasts much longer,—
Between shaking and dust,
I shall probably bust,
And never ride more in a Tonga.’

If you play a Game of Chance know before you begin
If you are benevolent you will never win

JOHN Brown 's body under the morning stars.
Six feet of dust under the morning stars.
And a panorama of war performs itself
Over the six-foot stage of circling armies.
Room for Gettysburg, Wilderness, Chickamauga,
On a six-foot stage of dust.

When from his coaly toil he came,
He loved to watch his fantails preen
Their snowy feathers, that, all day,
In the dark pit, like light had been
Before his eyes—the speckless, clean
And dazzling plumes of Jack and Nell,
Now fluttering round him like white flame,
Whose beauty never tongue could tell

In the depths of night,
I wonder, “Could it
really be—
a cuckoo's call?”
—heard from far back in the hills
for the first time

It's been so long since I headed for East Mountain--
how many times have the roses bloomed?
White clouds have scattered themselves away--
and this bright moon--whose house is it setting on?

Under the pines,
a color like the sky
when snow falls,
the rest of the mountain trail
one swath of white cloth

AS ONNET O F Sonnets : Beatrice, immortalized by “altissimo poeta … cotanto amante”; Laura, celebrated by a great tho' an inferior bard,—have alike paid the exceptional penalty of exceptional honour, and have come down to us resplendent with charms, but (at least, to my apprehension) scant of attractiveness.

True to your self, and sheets, you'l have me swear,
You shall; if righteous dealing I find there.
Do not you fall through frailty; Ile be sure
To keep my Bond still free from forfeiture.