Short Poems

We met last among flowers, among flowers we parted,
And here, a year later, there are flowers again;
But, with ways of the world too strange to foretell,
Spring only brings me grief and fatigue.
I am sick, and I think of my home in the country—
Ashamed to take pay while so many are idle.
…In my western tower, because of your promise,
I have watched the full moons come and go.

Baby loves to play with me,
Peek-a-boo! Peek-a-boo!
She goes and hides behind a tree,
I see you! I see you!

Baby is so very wee,
Hiding's easy as can be!

Dense, dense dust on the bed,
My inner heart remembers past love
Past love I cannot bear to remember,
Midnight's endless sighing
Sighing I imagine his face
Who did not want this long parting.
Separation slowly grown prolonged
My empty bed I give in to cups of wine.

But yesterday he was our little child,
To-day God's angel! and with bated breath
We speak of that sweet spirit, undefil'd,
Shrin'd in the awful mystery of death.

though dead
the chrysanthemum does not fall—
a horrid sight to see

Down in a garden, sat my dearest love;
Gay saffron flowers grew all around her;
The bluest sky shone in the heavens above:
Nay! had, but thus, the bright-limbed Cynthius found her,
He would have loved her, so that she had been
His Daphne, and his laurels green.

Miyako-bird! if not in vain men give
Thy pleasing name, my question deign to hear:—
And has she pass'd away, my darling dear,
Or doth she still for Narihira live?

My love came back to me
Under the November tree
Shelterless and dim.
He put his hand upon my shoulder,
He did not think me strange or older,

Hid ways have winds that lightly shake
The silver willows, half-awake,
Mysterious paths the moonbeams take
Across the shadowed mountain-lake;
The soul in deeper secret goes
Behind the lilac and the rose
In skies of evening, far away,
Beyond the flight of night and day.

To free me from domestic strife
Death called at my house, but he spake with my wife,
Susan, wife of David Pattison, lies here,
Stop, Reader, and if not in a hurry, shed a tear.