Short Poems

He stops beside the crowded curb, and lifts
The chained cup to his lips. And now he hears
The water thinly tinkling thro' the roar
Of wheels and trade. Back, back his memory drifts.
To his tired eyes the pasture spring appears,
And the dear fields that he shall see no more.

Thee I mourn, Aristoclides, first of that heroic band
Who so bravely fought and fell for freedom and the father-land.

My thoughts are as a garden-plot, that knows
No rain but of thy giving, and no rose
Except thy name. I dedicate it thine,
My garden, full of fruits in harvest-time.

Mercedes is a jungle-lily in a death house.
Mercedes is a doomed star.
Mercedes is a charnel rose.
Go where gold
Will fall at the feet of your beauty,
Mercedes.
Go where they will pay you well
For your loveliness.

Tell me bright Boy, tell me my golden Lad,
Whither away so frolick? why so glad?
What all thy Wealth in counsaile? all thy state?
Are Husks so deare? troth 'tis a mighty rate.

Why dost Thou wound my wounds, o Thou that passest by
Handling and turning them with an unwounded eye?
The calm that cools thine eye does shipwrack mine, for o!
Unmov'd to see one wretched, is to make him so.

Suppose he had been Tabled at thy Teats,
Thy hunger feels not what he eats:
He'll have his Teat ere long (a bloody one).
The Mother then must suck the Son.

Her eyes flood lickes his feets faire staine,
Her haires flame lickes up that againe.
This flame thus quench't hath brighter beames:
This flood thus stained fairer streames.

O what will you turn out, book, to be?
Who are not my joy, but my escape from the worst
And most accurst of my woe? Shall you be poetry,
Or tell truth, or be of past things the tale rehearsed?

Even on a spring morning
I hear the noise of autumn
In my Sicilian pipe, retracing
The longings of thousands of years.