Short Poems

we leave one home
to enter another~
none is for ever

Is it as plainly in our living shown,
By slant and twist, which way the wind has blown?

Authors the world and their dull brains have traced
To fix the ground where Paradise was placed;
Mind not their learned whims and idle talk;
Here, here's the place where these bright angels walk.

Had this fair figure, which this frame displays,
Adorn'd in Roman time the brightest days,
In every dome, in every sacred place,
Her statue would have breathed an added grace,
And on its basis would have been enroll'd,
'This is Minerva, cast in Virtue's mould.'

A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

After the wailing had already begun
along the walls, their ruin certain,
the Trojans fidgeted with bits of wood
in the three-ply doors, itsy-bitsy
pieces of wood, fussing with them.
And began to get their nerve back and feel hopeful.

On one side there lies the hated desert of Sin,
And on the other is the blooming spread of Faith.
Time moves on at its own pace,
Life keeps testing Man at every place.

RIDWAY robb'd DUNCOTE of three hundred pound,
Ridway was ta'en, arraign'd, condemn'd to die;
But, for this money, was a courtier found,
Begg'd Ridway's pardon: Duncote now doth cry,
Robb'd both of money, and the law's relief,
'The courtier is become the greater thief.'

Frail glass! thou mortal art as well as I;
Though none can tell which of us first shall die.

``With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots ;
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.''