Short Poems

Bowed down with age I seek my native place,
Unchanged my speech, my hair is silvered now;
My very children do not know my face,
But smiling ask, “O stranger, whence art thou?”

“Let me forget,” the sufferer prays,
“Past failings, faults, and sorrows!
There is no use in Yesterdays
That do not bless Tomorrows;
Who would not faint on life's dread waste,
And sicken at man's doings,
If the slow ivy made not haste
To cover the soul's ruins?”

Do you say this happiness
Is mere respite from disaster?
Ointment for some heart's distress
Sure to come in the hereafter?
Be it so. I choose to make
Merry,—for my poor heart's sake.

with a pencil
I torture an ant
on the desk at night

The endless mime goes on; new faces come,
—New mummers babble in each other's ears;
And some wear masks of woe, of laughter some,
—Nor know they play Life's Comedy of Tears.

By the wireless I can hear
Voices sounding loud and clear,
Some alone and some in choirs,
Coming over with no wires,
Floating out upon the air,
From one small room to everywhere.

A PITCHER of mignonette
In a tenement's highest casement,—
Queer sort of flower-pot—yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set,
To the little sick child in the basement—
The pitcher of mignonette,
In the tenement's highest casement.

Because of my going right across
Shiotsu Mountain,
The horse I was riding stumbled:
An omen that some one at home is longing for me.

Like to the booming of a bell
When struck, is the cicadæ's voice.

I long for the time
When the earth at peace shall lie
Beneath a calm sky,
And they raise the cup of joy
Full of gladness unalloyed.