I used to say hi
But now I say bye
I always think about how I will die
But for now I say bye
I know it's harsh
But it's true
My mind is at ease
I once felt like I wanted too die
But now I don't
I have things too look Forward too
I don't know why I felt that way
But in the end I did
I still do a little
But not much
I think about my life before I came here
But when I do
Oh!
Did you say you want my heart?
Here it is,
Of what use can a dead thing be anyway?
gold-coral leaves
too rich and transient
to hold this autumn day
loud shots of hunters
I shrink for graceful deer
radios shoot the sky
cold - death of sweaty yellow heat
reaches to snow
sun pales vanishes
sap tree life still
kicking against
frost
left: some clothes and letters
chips on dishes memories
her sisters neighbours
who shared recipes chat
memories of her some
like yours
there was a gap between you
you wanted others in
yet that deep work-a-day back-porch
wordless closeness
pulls you to her -
you die too
now she becomes herself
work struggle worry gone
her crisp voice, sense fill
silent shared rooms
a boy carved his initials
way up high
I'll be a knight he said
a poet lover sage
but they cut
the tree down
he worked dreamed mated
gave birth and lost a child
to death
had a profession comfort
used wood to burn
cosy night fires
flame-coloured flowers
and letters flew
around the room
chastising burning
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
‘The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
All crying ‘We will go with you, O Wind!’
The foliage follow him, leaf and stem;
But a sleep oppresses them as they go,
And they end by bidding him stay with them.
Since ever they flung abroad in spring
The leaves had promised themselves this flight,
Who now would fain seek sheltering wall,
Or thicket, or hollow place for the night:
And now they answer his summoning blast
With an ever vaguer and vaguer stir,
Or at utmost a little reluctant whirl
That drops them no further than where they were.
I only hope that when I am free
As they are free to go in quest
Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life
It may not seem better to me to rest.
Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one who overtaken by the end
Gives up his errand, and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won,
More than if life had never been begun.
Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch and oak,
I heard an old gibbet that crowned a bare hill
Creaking a song in the midnight chill;
And I shivered to hear that grisly refrain
That moaned in the night through the fog and the rain.
“Oh, where are the men who came to me
“And danced all night on the gallows tree?
“Gallant and peasant, man and maid,
“Many have walked in that long parade.
“My chains are broken and red with rust,
“My wood is sealed with the moldy crust.
“Have men forgotten their debt to me,
“That they come no more to the gallows tree?”
The drear wind moaned for a dark refrain,
And a raven called in the drifting rain:
“Oh, where are the feasts that awaited me
“Long, long ago on the gibbet tree?”
"Look, dearest, this shall be my flower!" she said,
"This starry jasmine." And she thrust a spray
For me to smell. "Remember!" Ah, today
I see her buoyant loveliness—her red
Sweet lips. In one brief twelvemonth she was dead.
Last night wind wailed. December's first snow lay
Upon the ground. Too unresigned to pray,
Too torn with racking grief to sleep, I fed
My misery on remembrance. "Love," I cried,
"Come back to me—come back! No heaven, no tomb
Can keep you from me. Come—my own, my own!"
And as I ceased the gloom was glorified—
I was aware that I was not alone—
A sudden scent of jasmine filled the room.
It is harvest time in the teeming sea
And the surges labor tirelessly
Like toil bent reapers with sickles of foam
They garner the harvest and carry it home,
Till the beaches throb to the rhythmic beat
As they strew it in windrows at our feet.
Slender strands like a whip lash, tear
At the cowering sands - ’tis the Dead-Man’s Hair
And the rockweed bulges with bulbous lumps
All yellow and brown, with the jagged stumps
Of kelp stalks wrenched by the undertow
From sunken glens where the sea things grow.
Eel grass rolled by the waves at play
In fresh cut swaths like the new mown hay;
Lettuce that glints with a fragile sheen:
And Irish moss with its mottled green