Short Poems

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?

Get up, get up, you lazy-head,
Get up, you lazy sinner,
We need those sheets for tablecloths,
It's nearly time for dinner!

Outwardly splendid as of old—
Inwardly sparkless, void and cold—
Her force and fire all spent and gone—
Like the dead moon, she still shines on.

One day, not here, you will find a hand
Stretched out to you as you walk down some heavenly street;
You will see a stranger scarred from head to feet;
But when he speaks to you you will not understand,
Nor yet who wounded him nor why his wounds are sweet.
And saying nothing, letting go his hand,
You will leave him in the heavenly street—
So we shall meet!

Old men, white haired, beside the ancestral graves,
All of the household now
Stand lonesome, leaning on their staves.

Mark you how the peacock's eye°
Winks away its ring of green,
Barter'd for an azure dye,
And the piece that's like a bean,
The pupil, plays its liquid jet°
To win a look of violet.

Lux my fair falcon, and your fellows all,
How well pleasant it were your liberty!
Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall.
But they that sometime liked my company,
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl;
Lo, what a proof in light adversity!
But ye, my birds, I swear by all your bells,
Ye be my friends, and so be but few else.

Leave thine own home, O youth, seek distant shores!
For thee a larger order somewhere shines—
Fear not thy fate! For thee through unknown pines
Under the cold north-wind the Danube pours;
For thee in Egypt the untroubled lands
Wait, and strange men behold the setting sun
Fall down and rise. Greatly be thou as one
Who disembarks, fearless, on alien sands.

It is a wonder foam is so beautiful.
A wave bursts in anger on a rock, broken up
in a wild white sibilant spray
and falls back, drawing in its breath with rage,
with frustration how beautiful!

It was not that you said I thought you knew,
Or that you thought I said that you, my dear,
Felt what I felt you felt. If it were clear,
Had God given soul to me, or sense to you,
Or guts, indeed, to either of the two,
Had it been worth a smile, or worth a tear,
Heart of my heart.