Middle Age
Like black ice
Scrolled over with unintelligible patterns by an ignorant skater
Is the dulled surface of my heart.
Sad poems
Sad poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Aliens
The chatter of little people
Breaks on my purpose
Like the water-drops which slowly wear the rocks to powder.
And while I laugh
My spirit crumbles at their teasing touch.
November
The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house
Are rusty and broken.
Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees,
The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes
Sweep against the stars.
And I sit under a lamp
Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart.
Even the cat will not stay with me,
But prefers the rain
Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.
A Year Passes
Beyond the porcelain fence of the pleasure garden,
I hear the frogs in the blue-green rice-fields ;
But the sword-shaped moon
Has cut my heart in two.
The Touch of Tears
Michael walks in autumn leaves
Rustling leaves and fading grasses,
And his little music-box
Tinkles faintly as he passes.
It's a gay and jaunty tune
If the hands that play were clever:
Michael plays it like a dirge,
Moaning on and on forever.
While his happy eyes grow big,
Big and innocent and soulful.
Wistful, halting little notes
Rise, unutterably doleful,
Telling of all childish griefs —
Baffled babies sob forsaken,
Birds fly off and bubbles burst,
Kittens sleep and will not waken.
The Garden
And now it is all to be done over again,
And what will come of it only God can know.
What has become of the furrows ploughed by pain,
And the plants set row on row ?
Where are the lines of beautiful bending trees,
The gracious springs, the depths of delicate shade,
The sunny spaces loud with the humming of bees,
And the grassy paths in the garden my life had made?
Lightning and earthquake now have blasted and riven ;
Even the trees that I trusted could not stand:
Now it lies here to the bitter winds of heaven,
A barren and a desolated land.
Atonement
When a storm comes up at night and the wind is crying,
When the trees are moaning like masts on laboring ships,
I wake in fear and put out my hand to find you
With your name on my lips.
No pain that the heart can hold is like to this one —
To call, forgetting, into aching space,
To reach out confident hands and find beside you
Only an empty place.
This should atone for the hours when I forget you.
Take then my offering, clean and sharp and sweet,
An agony brighter than years of dull remembrance.
I lay it at your feet.
Prevision
I know you are too dear to stay;
You are so exquisitely sweet:
My lonely house will thrill some day
To echoes of your eager feet.
I hold your words within my heart.
So few, so infinitely dear;
Watching your fluttering hands I start
At the corroding touch of fear.
A faint, unearthly music rings
From you to Heaven — it is not far!
A mist about your beauty clings
Like a thin cloud before a star.
My heart shall keep the child I knew.
When you are really gone from me.
And spend its life remembering you
As shells remember the lost sea.
My Mirror
There is a mirror in my room
Less like a mirror than a tomb,
There are so many ghosts that pass
Across the surface of the glass.
When in the morning I arise
With circles round my tired eyes,
Seeking the glass to brush my hair
My mother's mother meets me there.
If in the middle of the day
I happen to go by that way,
I see a smile I used to know —
My mother, twenty years ago.
But when I rise by candlelight
To feed my baby in the night,
Then whitely in the glass I see
My dead child's face look out at me.
Moonlight
The moon reached in cold hands across the sill
And touched me as I lay sleeping;
And in my sleep I thought of sorrowful things :
I wakened, and I lay weeping.
I could hear on the beach below the small waves break
And fall on the silver shingle,
And the sound of a footstep passing in the street
Where lamplight and moonlight mingle.
And I said : "All day I can turn my face to the sun
And lead my thoughts to laughter;
But I hope in my heart that I never shall sleep again
Because of the pain thereafter."
The moon's pale fingers wandered across my face
And the arm where my hot cheek rested,
And because of the tears in my eyes I could not see
Where the black waves rocked moon-crested.
The Lost Forest
I walked with my mother
Where the tall trees grow,
And she showed me tiny tables
Where the elves sit in a row,
And the bells that ring to call them
When the night winds blow.
There were small frosted toadstools,
And little cups of wine.
And velvet banks to rest on
Where moss grew thick and fine,
And a smooth brown ring for dancing
Underneath a pine.
But now when I go walking
All the way is clear;
The little bells are silent
And the moss grown sere,
In Spring
I do not know which is worse when you are away:
Long grey days with the lisping sound of the rain
And then when the lilac dusk is beginning to fall
The thought that perhaps you may never come back again ;
Or days when the world is a shimmer of blue and gold,
Sparkling newly all in the dear spring weather,
When with a heart that is torn apart by pain
I walk alone in ways that we went together.
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
Or try: